Test Setup

Installation and BIOS

There were no problems at all during installation. The motherboard is not a full size ATX, it's slightly narrower, which means there's going to be some extra room your your cabling ... excellent.

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The BIOS is very much standard. Although this is marketed as a budget motherboard, there are some options for overclocking which I find very useful. Multipliers, CPU and FSB fequencies can be adjusted, as well as options for adjusting voltages for CPU, DDR and chipset ... not bad.

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The rear ATX panel offers a range of connections including your usual PS/2 keyboard and mouse, printer and com ports. There's also 2 x eSATA connectors, 2 x USB, onboard gigabit ethernet LAN and audio in/out connections.

        

For expansion, the Alive NF5 has two PCIe x1 slot and one PCIe x16 slot and 3 standard PCI slots. On the motherboard there are 4 x SATA connectors, 4 x DDR2 DIMM slots upto 16Gb, and headers for HDMI, firewire and additional USB.

Procedures

In our tests we used the motherboard's standard BIOS settings first. Most settings were set to default (AUTO) for maximum compatibility. Memory clock was set to DDR2-800 with the memory timings was set to AUTO. We also used the latest video, audio and chipset drivers. Dual channel memory mode was enabled using the 2Gb of Crucial PC2-6400 Ram (2x 1Gb) Kit.

Here's a list of software/games we used for benchmarking. In all the gaming benchmarks we used a resolution of 1024x768 with default settings. 

 - CPUZ 
 - Science Mark 2
 - Sandra 2007
 - PC Mark 05
 - 3D Mark 2005
 - 3D Mark 2006
 - F.E.A.R.
 - Far Cry

Windows XP with service pack 2 and DirectX 9.0c was used as our operating system.