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Board
Layout
Now
that the general look of the motherboard has been
exposed, how does it look like from a closer view?
Just
like the KK266, the KK266plus also has 6 PCI slots,
1 ISA slot and 1 AGP Slot. Since this is the non-RAID
version, there is no onboard RAID controller and
the traces for the RAID chip and the additional
IDE ports can be seen clearly. The C-Media sound
chip can be seen near the edge of the motherboard
behind the PCI slots and the SPDIF connector for
the bracket of the sound chip can be seen as well.
The Jumper for enabling/disabling the onboard
sound is also present. The placement of the ZIF
socket is still the same, located at the far edge
of the motherboard. The difficult part of this
placement is when the case is pretty small, removing
the heatsink would seem quite impossible without
removing the power supply first. The KK266plus
now sports a shiny silver northbridge heatsink
which cooled the northbridge rather well. The
6 MOSFETs of the KK266 plus are still there, thus
it has a 3-phase power solution which is necessary
when running higher speed processors. The most
noteable difference is the placement of the power
supply connector. Instead of being located at
beside the socket near the edge of the motherboard,
it is now placed right beside the MOSFETs and
the capacitors. Reason? Well, it was placed there
perhaps to shorten the traces of the current from
the connector to the capacitors and MOSFETs. Cleaner
and faster signals would mean better stability
overall so this was done for the good of the motherboard.
Like before, the KK266plus also has a jumper for
setting the fsb setting of the CPU. Putting the
fsb jumper to 100MHz mode would give options from
100-132MHz fsb in 1MHz incriments, and memory
can be run synchronously or asynchronously. Setting
the fsb jumper would allow the user fsb options
of 133-200MHz in 1MHz incriments and memory speed
can only be synchronous to the bus speed.
Generally
speaking, there isn't much to complain about the
layout of the motherboard. Every part is located
in an ideal location except for one thing: The
Power Supply connector.
While
the primary reason it was placed there was to
improve the stability of the motherboard, it would
pose a problem because the cable would need to
go over the fan of the heatsink. This could affect
the airflow of the heatsink fan and could probably
raise temperatures a bit. But, that's just something
minor. The change was done for a good reason.
Another important jumper for the KK266plus is
the VIO voltage, which could be adjusted by +5%
or +10% from the default of 3.3v. Setting it to
+10%, I got 3.45v. Pretty good but still seems
quite lower than usual.
Overclocking
and Test System |
