Installation

I purchased a piece of Quick Step type flooring that measures 7 7/8" wide and cut it to 10" long. I wanted to use synthetic material since it doesn't warp. The space in the rear of the Benq is 10 ¼' wide x 6.5" so my 10" x 7 7/8" piece fit without showing itself from the front of the monitor. I mounted the motherboard using standard standoffs. The male end is 6-32 and the female end is M3. Not all standoffs are this size; some are M3 at each end. I tapped the holes to get the standoffs to screw in. I was planning to install a cover over the motherboard with a cutout for the CPU fan but I have not been able to find M3 screws to finish. The plan is to use the four holes on the corners of the motherboard and screw these bolts into the standoffs, using locknuts to hold it in position. Then fasten the cover with the top of the bolt and another locknut. My 9-year old daughter says the motherboard looks like a small city and I shouldn't hide it. I suppose I could let the city have a skyline for a while …

Setup & Issues

Once I remembered to set the CPU frequency and FSB with jumpers, the ASrock K7S41GX recognized the Sempron 2300. The board has an AMI BIOS, which I prefer over Phoenix that was on the other motherboard I was considering. Surprisingly it offers overclocking of the FSB and voltage adjustments for Vcore and memory. Even though this board is rated for DDR333 memory, there is an option to set it at DDR400. However after setting it to DDR400, there was no increase in memory bandwidth testing with Memtest v150 boot floppy. There is an AGP 8x slot so you can add a video card but this is not an option for this system since it would add to the size.

I have had issues with blurry text on the Shuttle SS51G and an Asus P4P800MX lately with CRT monitors but I'm happy to report that this is not the case with this motherboard and Benq LCD. The text is crisp and image is great at 1024 x 768 resolution.

I used a cd-rom and floppy to install the OS, test the memory, install the apps, and then removed them both to save space. The system takes about 35 seconds to boot into Windows XP Pro SP2.