Motherboard: Intel D845WN Review :: Installation

The only strange thing about the installation is how the J9G1 jumper has to be moved to work within the AMI BIOS and then changed again to get up and going. Other than that this is a very easy board to setup and configure so you can start enjoying your system pretty fast without to much hassle. I disabled the Rapid boost feature right off the bat so I could access the BIOS more easily during my testing.

After a quick install of the CPU using thermal paste for an air free seal with the Intel retail cooling solution we moved along with the installation of the SDRAM. After that we then mounted the board to the test station with six screws to secure it which required no additional washers as the board has ample space around the mounting holes to prevent shorting. Some people still email me asking if washers are required for installation and the answer is no on almost all the boards made today.

All the PCI cards used and the AGP video card were installed without any problems as were the IDE cables. The whole basic setup process excluding software installation took about ten minutes of time and can be accomplished even by the beginner who has not done this procedure before as long as they read the manual because that is the golden book for information on your board. Educate yourself and read as much as you can about your board familiarizing yourself with its controls and functions.

Older AGP vide cards such as the Voodoo 5 will not work properly on the D845WN as it has a different slot interface and voltage requirement than some of the older AGP cards but any recent video cards that have been released should be compatible with this motherboard. Any of the Nvidia Ge-Force or ATI Radeon line of video cards will perform without problems. You shouldn't have any difficulties here but if using older equipment you may run into some incompatibility issues so check your video card specs to make sure it will work properly.

Caution: If the video card used is not keyed for 1.5 V signaling, then it will not physically fit in the AGP slot of the Intel Desktop motherboard D845WN.

We had a little difficulty hooking up the system wires to the board due to lack of technical information, but after experimenting a few minutes with the connections all was well. The retail motherboard will have all the proper documentation but this being a promotional board had limited technical specs available at the time of testing.

The first thing I did was look around in the BIOS to get a feel for what the D845WN had to offer in the way of control features. The BIOS is where you can fine tune your motherboard and change things such as the boot order of your IDE devices or your memory and onboard feature options.

To get into the BIOS if you disabled the Intel Rapid boost feature in your initial setup you will need to hit the F2 key on your keyboard to re access the BIOS. Please exercise caution when making adjustments in the BIOS due to wrong setting can result in serious system performance degradation or cause outright problems so do your homework before experimenting here.

Windows installation and the installation of the appropriate system drivers available on the drivers CD went in without problems of any kind and there are additionally a couple of cool features in Windows to play with such as the Intel Active Monitor which gives you a play by play display of your systems performance and system levels via a Windows based interface that works quite well actually and seems to be accurate as well.

The on-board audio is also a solid plus even without the CNR riser for the average two speaker/subwoofer system and offers a vast array of environmental and sound shaping options to custom tailor the sound to your preference. This actually sounds very well with MP3 and digital sound sources so it should please a variety of people due to its superior use of the AC97 Codec.

The CNR riser add on card from Analog Devices (on boards that support it) adds the element of six speaker surround sound and Fiber Optical connections for true Digital sound transfer. The on-board sound utilizes the onboard AC97 codec with an advanced set of drivers from ADI that supports Direct X, Direct sound and the A3D and EAX audio formats for environmental sound shaping in 3D gaming.

There are also some nice interface features for the onboard Intel 10/100 Network adapter in the Windows environment called the Intel Pro set which has various features and lets you monitor your network functions. Intel does come up with some nice software options for the user and these can prove to be useful tools when checking out your systems networking is maintaining a status quo.

All in all this is good board for the end user as it is easy enough to figure out and work with without too much hassle. The software setup and configuration of the board took about forty minutes of total time due to my extensive tinkering around but could have been done in fewer than thirty if just done without distraction. The bottom line here is I can recommend this board as a good beginner board as it is very user friendly and compatible with most components making setup a non strenuous affair. It is time now to move on to the performance section of this review and see how the D845WN did in our stability and system performance tests. Read on.