Friday News part 3

My first look at the lighted image made me gawp in aww as to the sheer 'shininess' of the finished article. With hand on heart I can say that this mod from thought to reality took me no more than 30mins.

We have long been looking at VIA KT400 boards, and for a while those boards were at the forefront of AMD based boards. Technically, the KT400 didn't bring as much to the table as was hoped, but at the time Nvidia's vaunted NForce2 based boards were nowhere on the horizon. Well now the Nforce2 is out, and it's taking the market by storm, thanks to it's 128bit Dual Channel memory support, great performance, official DDR400 support, very nice overclocking support, and a superb feature set. Today we're looking at FIC's Nforce2 based AU11 board, a board that FIC very confidently believes is a sure winner. We're here to find out just how much of a winner.

After installing the 8K9A2+ and setting the BIOS settings to optimal I proceed to format and load Windows XP. XP though, refuses to load, randomly locking up, blue screening and even rebooting during installation. Next boot I go into the BIOS and set everything to system defaults. No luck it still won't load XP. On a whim, I return to the BIOS and set the chip to 10 X 100. Finally the system is stable and Windows loads fine without lockups.