Date: April 25th, 2003
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner, Head Editor & Hardware Reviewer)
Product was donated by: Via Technologies
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INCLUDED BONUS PRODUCT

Other than the motherboard itself and the usual drivers, Via has included some useful and interesting additions to the package which will be appreciated by the consumer. Everyone knows that getting more than you expected always leaves you feeling content and happy with your purchase instead of bitter and screwed out of your hard earned cash.

As always, a premium board usually comes with an interesting box. Let's hope the gentleman in the top photo is not throwing his head back in anger when his computer corrupts itself. Hehe, kiddin ;).

Bonus Software

Via included a nice windows based software suite to modify, tweak, overclock or monitor your computer in real-time.

The suite named Flight Deck is comprised of the following.

Sick of making boot floppies and flashing your bios via DOS? This little program could help you. Mind you, I am no fan of flashing through DOS, but it's relatively safe. Flashing through windows can be done safely if everything is working flawlessly, but if you are flashing your bios, obviously there has to be something wrong or you wouldn't be updating. And for the love of god, set your system to default speed while flashing. Flash at your own risk! If windows locks while flashing and corrupts the flash process, you will/could have yourself a nice dead piece of worthless silicon screwed into your case. Just warning my readers ;).

As a windows based overclocking tool, jetstream allows you to overclock, adjust and monitor voltages and components on your computer. I played around with this feature a bit and had some trouble. As said before, if you push things too much, the system will freeze, and you will be forced to do a hard reboot. It's great that Via included this feature, but you can get into a lot of trouble and corruption if you don't use it properly. My personal mess-up resulted in a complete reinstall of the operating system. It is my recommendation that you base all your overclocking in the bios.