The board also has inbuilt audio - through my little speakers it sounded much the same as the SB16's / SB32's I'm used to. A more discerning listener may want to use a better audio board - in which case you can disable it in the bios and use a PCI or AMR card. Disabling the on-board card means the on-board joystick connector is disabled too.. so you end up with a useless socket sticking out the back of your ATX case.

There are a few jumpers on the board - they let you adjust:

CPU Front-Side Bus - but you can do this in the BIOS, and with more options there.
CPU Core Voltage - for overclocked stability.
I/O Voltage - the voltage applied to the RAM, PCI, AGP and on-board chipset. This is a nice feature for overclocking too.
Release IRQ12 - If you're not using a PS/2 mouse, you can use IRQ12 for other devices.

There is also a connection for a chassis intrusion switch, if your case supports it.

Mounting the motherboard in the case was unremarkable, as you'd expect. However, once assembled I found the machine would not power up. No beeps, no spinning power-supply fan, nothing. This caused some consternation in the AggCave, I can tell you. After a few minutes of checking cabling, swapping cards and chewing fingernails I eventually traced the problem to the keyboard - the one on the testbench is an AT-style keyboard with an AT->PS/2 adapter. I swapped it for a genuine PS2-type keyboard and the system powered up straight away. Something to keep in mind.

The speed at which the BIOS starts on this machine is quite incredible. Seriously, the Viper V770U video card takes longer to wake up than the motherboard does. With the crappy monitor I have on the service desk, the machine was at the Win98 splash screen before the monitor had fully woken up. Impressive. In fact, it may even be TOO fast.. more than once while rebooting to fiddle with BIOS settings did I miss the prompt and end up back in Win98.

The BIOS itself is the standard AMI bios - but extremely configurable on this board. As an example, you can boot from FDD, any of the 4 possible IDE devices, CDROM, SCSI, ZIP, LS120 or network. Any combination of any 4 of these, in any order. RAM-wise, you can let the motherboard interrogate the EPROM on the DIMMS to get their settings, or you can override them yourself with no less than 5 settings to play with. Be aware that this board requires PC100 ram as a minium - PC66 just won't cut it. In fact, during some highly scientific stress-testing of the board (using that well-known analysis tool, Driver), I found the display would shudder during disk access in the game. I tried turning the onboard audio off, disabling block mode and UDMA on the HDD etc.. finally I tracked it down to the dodgy RAM I was using. It's Compaq RAM, labelled "PC100 3-2-2" .. hmm.. I swapped it for some generic 2-2-2 PC100 ram and the problems vanished.

A strange thing in the BIOS, though, is that I can't get it to tell me the CPU temperature. The external temp sensors report fine, but the CPU temp is 0C (and I'm not using a peltier :) ). Even the included Hardware Probe software doesn't pick it up - and neither could MBM. Strange, because the manual's screenshots show a proper value.

Win98 installation was a breeze - pretty much everything was detected and installed during the basic 98 installation routine. A few extra things had to be installed from the included CD after 98 had finished, namely UDMA support for the HDD's, the miniport driver for AGP and the drivers for the on-board audio. A few clicks of the mouse, a few reboots and you're ready to go.

The included CD also has a few other goodies - PC-cillin AntiVirus, MIDI software from Yamaha, Acrobat Reader 4.0 etc. Not a selling point in itself, but a nice inclusion.