Azza KT600 ALX
This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.
LayoutAzza is not a household name to enthusiasts or to customers in North America because their products are hard to find here.
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The CPU socket on the Azza ALX board does not include the 4 mounting holes, and ironically the board has ample room for larger heatsinks if it did have them. There are no PCB guards either.
The ATX power connector is stuffed between a whole herd of capacitors, almost in a sort of artistic design. Unfortunately, this makes the connector a pain to remove and also forces the ATX cable to go over or around the heatsink fan.
The DIMMs do come in contact with the AGP card when it is installed, so memory needs to be installed before the graphics card. The north bridge heatsink is large, and at first glance would be a good solution. However, the heatsink was not tightly affixed to the KT600 chipset. In fact, I could very easily move the heatsink around on the springs by accidentally touching it. You can see that cooling can be improved by better retention or adhesion.
The IDE channels are located towards the bottom of the board layout, below the DIMM slots. It is a bit crowded on the lower half of the PCB, but not excessive. The AGP slot here does not have a retention clip, which hits me as very odd as every other board has some form of this. Even in an OEM market, I would think the retention mechanism would be a good idea for shipping, etc. Six PCI slots are also included here.
The case connectors, though not color coded like on some other boards, are easy to interpret. Oddly, capacitors are placed all over the board in random spots. Some of them seem to get in the way of installation as well, like the ones immediately in front of and behind the SATA connectors.
Features
First, with the 8237 south bridge, the Azza ALX board included 2 channels of SATA and RAID support.
On the external connectors, we can see Azza included AC’97 audio and a 10/100 network connection.
The Azza motherboard just doesn’t have a lot to offer in the realm of features.
Included Extras
This is not the final retail package, but I would expect to see this kind of extras included. Here we got two SATA cables and one USB lead with 2 additional USB ports.
Bios
The Azza board is not really aimed at enthusiasts, and because of that you won’t see a lot of the features that we are used to seeing here.
Here are your overclocking options… You can adjust the CPU frequency from 200 to 233 MHz. And in fact, you need to set jumpers on the motherboard to change between 133/166/200 MHz FSB settings.
Here are the available memory timings for the Azza KT600 board.
Memory Issues
The compatibility with the Azza board was fairly good, but it refused to run at the 6-3-3 2.0 settings that we used on other motherboards. So, the Azza KT600 ALX benchmarks were run using 7-4-4 2.0.
