ECS GF8200A Black & ASRock K10N78FullHD-hSLI

BIOS:

Both the ECS GF8200A Black and ASRock K10N78FullHD-hSLI use a BIOS from American Megatrends Inc. Both motherboards have the standard features one would expect within a desktop BIOS along with a few tweaking/overclocking options, but don't expect to push these motherboards as hard or tweaking them to the extent of say the latest high-end ASUS motherboard. Below are some of the options found within the ASRock AMI BIOS.

Some of the ECS BIOS options...

System Setup:

As we mentioned in our GeForce 8200 IGP review, this chipset has a few issues currently with Linux. If you are using a Linux distribution that ships with a pre-2.6.25 Linux kernel, the Serial ATA support will likely go undetected. This means you will have a tough time using Ubuntu 8.04 LTS or other distributions from earlier this year unless using a separate PCI/PCI-E disk controller to get you started or building a new kernel first. The distribution we were successful using with the NVIDIA MCP78S "out of the box" was Fedora 9.

Once we were past these disk controller issues with both the ECS and ASRock motherboards, we hadn't run into any other Linux-related issues. The system hardware consisted of an AMD Phenom 9500, 2GB of OCZ Reaper HPC DDR2-800MHz memory, 160GB Western Digital SATA 2.0 HDD, and SilverStone Zeus ST75ZF power supply. As we have already extensively tested the NVIDIA GeForce 8200 IGP graphics, we had stuck with the integrated graphics during this round of testing. On the software side was Fedora 9 with the Linux 2.6.25.4 kernel, X Server 1.4.99.901, GCC 4.3.0, and the NVIDIA 173.14.09 binary driver. The tests from the Phoronix Test Suite (v1.0.2) we used included timed Gzip compression, LAME MP3 encoding, GnuPG file encryption, OpenSSL, RAMspeed, Nexuiz, OpenArena, and IOzone.