Jetway A210PDAG is the second ATi RX480 board we test at OCW. This board, just like the MSI MS-7093 we tested before does not exhibit any major issues. The only difference is the south bridge used on both boards. As it is based on the ULi M1573 chipset, it supports NCQ and HD Audio which both are readily available on Intel platforms.

As you probably know, HD Audio can deliver the support and sound quality for up to eight channels at 192 kHz/32-bit quality, while the AC‘97 specification can only support six channels at 48 kHz/20-bit. With 8 channels of indepdent audio, you can probably have 4 channels playing a game while another 2 channels playing music and 2 others for a voice conferencing software.

This is a breakthrough as it is the first chipset that brings the K8 platform closer to the Intel platform. This mainboard supports up to 8 x USB 2.0 (4 rear + 4 thru' external bracket) ports. Gigabit Ethernet is supported via PCI Realtek  8110S chipset. There is no support for 1394.

Here is a screenshot of HD-Tach running the benchmark against a Seagate ST3160827AS SATA NCQ drive.

In our test, we compared the performance to 3 other NF4 Ultra boards and 1 ATi Express 200P board. From the tests, we can see that the performance of this board is quite close to the MSI MS-7093. When compared to the NF4 Ultra boards, it is slightly slower by less than 1% in difference.

The board comes with overclocking options. Voltage can be set for the VCore, Vdimm, Vchipset. FSB can be set up to 300MHz. There is also option for ASync 166,133,100 operation. HTT frequency can be set to only 800MHz and 1Ghz; HTT width can be set to 8 or 16 bits. Multiplier control is available for adjustments from 6x ~ 25x. There are also options for you to adjust the ram timings. See Gallery for screen shots.

We tested the overclocking features of this mainboard and we are glad that it can overclock as it seems that the PCI-E, SATA, PCI are all FIXED. In the tests, there were some interesting observations that we would like to share with you. On our first boot, the following adjustments are made.

Vdimm = 2.85v, Vcore = 1.55v, Vchipset = 1.9v, HTT=800MHz (4x). As the HTT can't be set to 600MHz, we have no choice but to stick to 800MHz throughout. I set the FSB to 220, multiplier to 8, ram timings is CAS 3, 8-4-4. I went ahead and reach for 250. It didn't POST. I kick in the ASync settings DDR333 (166) e.g. CPU:MEM = 200:166. 250 seems ok now as the ram is running at a ratio. RAM is running at DDR416 or so. I went ahead for 266MHz x 8 but it didn't POST at all. I set it back to 250 x 8 but it wouldn't POST anymore. Strange. I cleared the BIOS, do it again from 220->240->250->266. Incremental overclocking? Well, it seems so. There must be some bugs with the BIOS that needs to be corrected.

Overall, this board is stable at default and does average overclocking due to its BIOS implementation. Anyway, it is a good try by Jetway to bring the first HD Audio equipped K8 board to the masses.

Pricing

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Pros

• USB 2.0 
• SATA RAID
• HD Audio 8 ch audio
• Overclocking features - voltage, fsb, mutliplier

Cons

• PCI based Gigabit Ethernet
• 1394
• No Diagnostic LEDs

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.