Jetway Kuroshio BI-600 Intel X58

Motherboard Layout

When considering buying a motherboard it’s quite important to consider the layout of the motherboard. The layout has to be carefully considered in price and features. Feature like more PCI-e ports or floppy disks might be important more to some over the others.

Here’s several small issues with Jetway’s layout that you might want to keep in mind:

First concern is the SATA plugs placement which makes it hard to have a flagship video card and add new hard-drives without removing the video card. The reason is that a 10 inch video card will simply cover a clear entrance for the port and on the other end you will most likely hit the hard drive bays from the other end.

Another issue, which is actually quite common in motherboards, is the placement of CPU power connector in a corner. The problem placing it in the top right corner(in the picture above) is that this corner will most likely be in a very tight place once you install the mother board into your chassis. On top of that if you have a large heat sink for your CPU it might become virtually impossible to connect the power connector to your CPU without removing the mother board. If you have a fully modular power supply it might be a good idea to plug in that connector before installing the motherboard and then connecting it to the power supply. Those of you who have the CPU power attached to PSU your option is installing the PSU first, plug in in the CPU power and then installing the motherboard with a hanging wire.

As you can see in the top left corner is the floppy port. Even if there are still people who need floppy drives on a i7 system, the port is placed so far away from the front side panel that some cords might not even reach the floppy drive. The cord that was included is long enough to reach in most cases but you can forget any wire managing because it will be hanging tightly right across your motherboard.

Another small issues is the Audio port which is in the farthest corner possible from top panel jacks.

Port 80 diagnostic shows codes that indicate some type of problems or actions that are being done. Many of the codes have been around for long and are universal for most BIOS’es but here’s a link for AMI post codes. These can be used for troubleshooting.

Another feature that should be noted is the CMOS clear button on the back I/O panel. It’s easily accessible without the need to open up your case. The feature itself is very useful when you’re planning on playing around with BIOS and accidentally preventing the computer from booting.

BIOS

The AMI BIOS on BI-600 is somewhat limited, especially when considering overclocking. In fact it’s limited by lack of Uncore voltage setting which might prevent you getting you RAM past 1600MHz. The Dram timing setting themselves were either all manual or all auto and lacked any individual auto setting. This might make it difficult for inexperienced overclockers.

Overclocking

Overclocking the i7 920 up to 3.2GHz was like taking a candy from a baby. Increasing the base clock(BCLK) up to 165MHz sped up the CPU  to 3.29GHz, enough to handle the 1333Mhz RAM.

Safely increasing the voltage up 1.3volts did not cause any instability. Though the voltage that was supplied increased up to 1.265 instead of the set 1.3.

To get 3.6GHz I increased BCLK to 180 and voltage up to 1.275. This seem to produce pretty stable configuration with CPU actually running at 1.24. With i7 920 running at 3.6GHz it blew all the benchmarks out of the water. With torture testing it ran for 2 hours without crashing which is a good indication of it’s stability.

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