Thoughts

At the end of our examination of EQS' A58XK9-ALF motherboard, we're left with a bit of a mixed bag. Starting off from a feature set perspective, this board certainly has a plethora of USB and Serial ATA ports, which should be enough for all but the most demanding users. On the other hand, it doesn't offer anything particularly (RAID 0+1 aside) to differentiate itself from the reference design - Whether this is an issue, and the board is missing something you require, is down to personal preference.

From a performance point of view, things look most impressive, with this RX480-based motherboard at worst keeping pace and at best beating out the nForce 3 board we pitted it against here. Considering that this is still early days for ATIs new chipset, the future is looking most promising. Which brings us to the biggest downfall of EQS' offering, which may well temper any excitement about performance - The BIOS. While I wasn't expecting this particular motherboard to offer a plethora of overclocking options, as it simply isn't aimed towards that market, what I would expect is at least the ability to tune and alter memory timings, and in this discipline the A58XK9-ALF is more than lacking. If this is fixed in future BIOS revisions or final retail boards, then we could be left with something far more worthwhile on our hands. As it stands, the A58XK9-ALF is great for out-of-the-box performance, but a major disappointment for anyone looking to tweak a little extra speed out of their rig.

Pros

Reasonable layout
Good performance
Plenty of SATA and USB ports

Cons

Sparse BIOS
Distinct lack of overclocking/memory timing options

Thanks

EQS for the sample.

HEXUS.right2reply

We gave EQS the opportunity to comment on the review and their Major Account Executive European Region, Boyd Chung, had this to say.

Dear ,

Firstly EQS would wish to thank We for reviewing the A58XK9-ALF motherboard.

EQS motherboards are manufactured in China, and our group has had more than 20 years experience in manufacturing motherboards, add-on graphics cards and other components for the PC market. We concentrate our efforts on manufacturing ATi, Intel and VIA chipset motherboards.

All EQS motherboards come with a 3 year warranty; EQS being the first motherboard manufacturer to introduce this length of warranty over 6 six years ago. Our goal is to turn around an RMA motherboard within 5 to 10 working days, but our actual turn around time is generally completed within 2 working days. Please also note that our return rate is currently around 0.5% (failure rate is even lower) of all products manufactured, so actually having to go through the RMA process is very unlikely!

EQS was the first manufacturer to introduce an ATi 9100 PRO IGP (RS350) chipset motherboard for Socket 478 in Europe, and again EQS has been first to market with an ATi Xpress 200 (RS480) PCI Express solution for Athlon 64 Socket 939.

The review A58XK9-ALF motherboard sent to We (PCB revision 1.0) is actually an engineering sample, so there may have been a slight loss in overall performance compared to the final production board (PCB revision 2.0), which will be fully finalised and available by the time you read this review.

Unfortunately there are no over-clocking options for CPU and memory on these boards at the present time, this is because we wish to push a stable, finished product into the market and then start work on the over-clocking friendly versions. This over-clocking limitation comes from the specific clock generator IC we have chosen to implement on the current models. This clock generator IC is only targeted to give the official CPU clock figures, another type of clock generator IC (requiring hardware re-design) is needed to add over-clocking functions to the series, but rest assured we will be making this modification to later variations of this board.

The ATi Xpress 200 boards will come in four flavours, Micro ATX with and without on-board graphics, and full ATX with and without onboard graphics. The former being the M56K9-MLF and M56XK9-ALF, and the latter being the A58K9-MLF and A58XK9-ALF boards respectively. The models with on-board graphics utilise ATi’s latest RS480 Northbridge, this currently provides the fastest on-boards graphics currently available in any chipset.

Above all EQS aims to provide the best service and support operations in the market today! If you are looking for more information on EQS products, please visit EQSComputers.com

Thank you. (Especially thanks David and Paul)

Best Regards,

Boyd Chung
Major Account Executive European Region

[Pages]
   Last Page
   [1]· Introduction
   [2]· Specification
   [3]· Layout
   [4]· BIOS
   [5]· Presentation, Bundle and Manual
   [6]· System Setup and Notes
   [7]· Memory Tests
   [8]· CPU Tests
   [9]· Graphical Tests
   [10]· Thoughts



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