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The 2208 by Sono is a 4 layer standard ATX form factor Socket A motherboard based on the KT133 VIA VT8363 / VT82C686B chipset which at this point in the game is a little dated but still has a viable market presence in the low end market. Featuring support for AMD's Athlon / Duron processors in speeds from 700MHz - 1.3GHz with an auto-adjusted 100-133MHz FSB that self detects depending on what CPU you use in your system configuration. For your system memory needs the 2208 has three 168 pin sockets supporting a total of 768Mb of ECC PC133 SDRAM. The system is also setup to automatically detect your RAM type and speed. This is a budget board and using standard SDRAM which is the lowest cost memory solution available today, this factor will also add to its low overall total system cost an appealing thing to those on a tight or fixed budget.
The motherboard also features Five PCI 2.1 compliant 32 bit slots one 16 bit ISA slot a 64 bit 4X video slot and one really useless AMR slot. The AMR slot is one of those little slots that may never see a card readily available to go there making it wasted real estate. An extra PCI slot would have been a much better feature to include on the board rather the AMR slot which really just kills the board features wise.
Your IDE devices are controlled by the two independent ATA100 controllers that are the same on every board that uses this chipset so no surprises there. You can control up to four drives at one time with these controllers. The drives can be setup in a two master two slave configuration which is enough for general usage but offers nothing out of the ordinary for the user. The system is controlled by the onboard Award BIOS which offers limited actual CPU control but comes preset for optimal performance levels. The BIOS is flash programmable and offers hardware monitoring in the form of CPU temperature and speed along with fan speeds and internal warning devices if the system CPU gets too hot or the fans fail. Overall this is a very moderate board that just gets the job done without a lot of bells and whistles that more expensive boards come with as standard faire. With a little spit and polish these guys can come up and make a name for themselves in this ever changing market. I liked the boards design as well as its layout so there are some very positive things about this board it is just not enough to push this board into the spotlight. Not a bad effort at all on the part of Sono. Visible slots on the rear I/O connection
Lets move on to the testing and performance section of this review and see how well the motherboard does in our test lab.
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