My first project (Asrock K7S8X)

Member Name: Nickodemus

Product:	Asrock K7S8X
Date:	24/08/03 (3660 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Has most ports you will need

Disadvantages: More info on sound, Better explanation of Bios

MY UPGRADE

Previously I had a Time AMD 700 machine which was creeking a bit so I went for the big step to upgrade it. Got some books and then went for it. The board comes with the floppy and hard disk/CD cables and insert. The only thing was I had to buy some more mounting screws as my Time machine's ATX case had a micro atx board in it. Installation went ok, I did it in a bit of a cack way and should of disabled everything in bios and then slowly turned each item on, ie sound, usb support etc. Putting the cooler fan on is scary as you think your are going to break something but this my first time. Everything seemed to go except sound!!! Prompts appeared for the sound card installation and it appeared to be installing but no sound. I tried newer drivers than those that come with the motherboard, but nothing. I was getting narked and went out an got a cheap sound card but that didn't work either. Then by some sheer accident I was looking through the menus in add new hardware (Windows 98) and saw "install microsoft copatioble sound card" it then prompted me to install thew card which i effectively did by turning on the onbord sound and wahey it worked. Now why didn't someone mention this, i have NEVER seen any mention of this in any of the books i have read on upgrading! Sounds is good (5.1) and so the recently Animatrix was cracked open for viewing.

Jumper setting is also confusing to non techies and just a short explanation would have been appreciated, though the answers could be found on the internet.

Information on the Bios screen could of been better to, with more explantion on what the menus actually means again for the non techies.

You get a video of a far eastern girl in bacofoil crop top, boots and minskirt expaling how to install your motherboard, but again its a bit lightweight and Think it could of said more.

I had bought this as part of a package at Maplin which were offering this board w
ith a fan and AMD 2400+ chip. So have left the price out.

I unfortunatly couldn't use my old graphics card as it was an old 1 x Riva TNT card and the voltage was wrong. The board suport 8X AGP.

TECHIE INFORMATION

A good place for info on this board I found was http://www.ocworkbench.com/2003/asrock/k7s8xguide/ setupguide.htm This page also provides help with win XP as it seems to have a problem with sound.

Here is some nerd information taken from that site;
" The K7S8X features the latest revision of the SIS 746fx chipset rev.A2 and the sis963L rev.C1 south bridge. This 'Lite' version of the south bridge supports ata133 IDE drive performance, 6 USB2 ports, SIS900iLan and SIS7012 sound production. The board uses the C-media 9739A chip as a sound decoder and a Realtek PHY LAN chip to facilitate Ethernet access. Unfortunately the 'Lite' version of the SIS963L does not feature IEEE FIRE wire technology or Serial ATA support.

The North bridge does officially support 100,133,166mhz support for all AMD Athlon processors and this board does feature a jumper setting for 200mhz CPU fsb. SIS does officially support 200mhz for this chipset (200mhz support is available with the forthcoming SIS748 chipset). The board features support 100,133,166 and 200mhz dram speeds and supports Asynchronous settings for all speeds, so you can have 133/100, 133/166, 133/200 or 166/200. Though at present asynchronous operation and mean poorer memory performance than Synchronous 133/133 or 166/166 operation. This situation is being remedied with improved bios releases from Asrock, keep checking the OCWorkbench K7S8X bios page for future bios updates.

The board comes with the Asrock AMD-SIS version 1.0 drivers disk. This is a very basic cd rom containing drivers for Windows 98,98se, NT, ME , 2000 and XP. A copy of PCcillin 2002, Adobe Acrobat 5, Direct X8.1. The disk also contains the motherboard manual in PDF for
mat and a visual guide to setting up the motherboard featuring a rather nice looking Taiwanese girl in silver spandex. To see the visual guide to setting up the board you need to watch the guide in Windows Media player, what happens if you do not have access to another pc to watch the guide?

Supplied drivers:

AGP driver 1.13r3
IDE driver 2.03
LAN driver 1.16
Sound driver C-media v25

The disk claims to have a USB2 driver as well, but in fact it doesn't. To get USB2 you have to download Windows XP service pack1 for the extra Enhanced USB driver."

This site contains info on where to get the latest upgrades.

SUPPORT

Support from the asrock support site wasn't amazing but no doubt to it having to come from taiwan. WAs pulling my hair out with the sound as explained everythin but was getting answers like check that mute hasn't been selected!!

Apart from the sound probs would really reccomend it.

Official website; http://www.asrock.com.tw/index_english.html

Summary: