PC Chips M810 LMRT Micro ATX Review

Good Points
Having a hard time thinking of any good points. The system ran well under Win98 for a year and a half using an Athlon 1700+ and 128K RAM.

Bad Points
Then I decided to upgrade to 256K RAM and WIN XP and the fun began. The modem freezes at anytime between dialup and 2 hours. Replaced the modem with a Creative that is XP compatible and disabled the internal (no upgrade SW for XP appears available). Now the modem stays up but often the CPU goes to 100% usage doing who knows what and everything stops. Absolutely cannot run higher than 1100MHz or the whole system including RTC goes bonkers. System often restarts for no reason or crashes on startup. MS reports are sent from XP and the on-line diagnostics always report "Driver Problem" but can never specify which one. The last time it would hang in XP "Safe" mode until the Bus speed was set in the Bios to 100MHz from 133MHz.

General Comments
Bottom line, the PC Chips M810 is for the birds if you are looking for anything newer than the Pinta, Nina or Santa Marie. I was beginning to think it was "just me" until I ran across this review site. Thanks for the sanity check!! With this board, keep it slow and run old Windows and you might survive. I just ordered a new ASUS and will hand this "dumbed down" boat anchor to my teenage daughter to do her homework on - it can probably handle that.