Today I’m looking at a Socket 370 made by AOpen around mid 1999. It’s a clearly budget board as we will see when taking a closer look. I referenced this contemporary Anandtech article whilst writing this. I’m trying out a different device for taking the overview photos today as my old camera has seen better days. Let us begin with a shot of the whole board.
The first obvious thing is the mATX form factor and the lack of an AGP slot. So this was definitely not intended for the gaming or high performance market. It sports an Intel 810-DC100 chipset with the basic on-board video, and an AD1881 soft audio codec for sound. The chipset is interesting as it has the FSB and memory clocks separate. The memory will run at 100Mhz at a maximum, whilst the FSB can achieve speeds well in excess of this. This board can increase the FSB speed but the RAM clock cannot be changed. This means that any overclock could only be effective up until the point the memory bus becomes saturated, at which point overclocking any further would not increase performance.
Cache SRAM chips
The on-board graphics are fairly basic, it’s roughly equivalent to the Intel i740, a GPU that was never known for being particularly fast. It uses the system memory for much of the work involved in 3d rendering, which obviously consumes memory bandwidth the CPU could potentially require. To mitigate this flaw a 4MB cache was added to this version of the chipset, it is used mostly for storing the Z-buffer. I’d imagine this makes a fair difference whilst rendering 3d images, but doesn’t entirely solve the problem.
The on-board sound solution is similarly very basic. It’s an AD1881 audio codec, which Anandtech described as a “soft” audio device. By this they meant that much of the processing work for audio is done by the host CPU rather than specialised hardware on the sound chip. This is much like early sound cards which relied on the CPU for mixing audio channels together as the hardware only played back a stream of samples. At the time this board was made there were plenty of more advanced sound chips available that could do everything in hardware, some even turned up as integrated sound.
In terms of performance this board wouldn’t be all that good compared to the higher end. However that’s not what it was really designed for. For basic use such as office work and web browsing this would have been adequate for the time.
From a technicians point of view there are a few issues with this board. Firstly, there isn’t much variability in how you can build a system with it, only budget machines are really possible. The on-board graphics does not perform well and there is no AGP slot for an upgrade. There are only two memory slots which are limited to 100Mhz RAM, so you’re quite limited in how much and how fast the memory can be. Finally the floppy connector is in an odd spot near the AMR slot, this results in running a ribbon cable across the board which is generally bad for air flow in the case. My particular example is further hampered by one of the memory slots having a broken retaining clip.
For the end user it would probably perform well for most basic tasks, but get bogged down when they do something requiring a little more grunt. The lack of upgrade options would probably be an issue for some depending on what their needs are. Given that it’s a budget model none of this should be surprising, only people looking for a low price would have found this appealing.
sparcie 
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