Pine Technology BA1-D Dual BX

We all know what pine trees are, for nature lovers, they add a beautiful green to any outdoor scene, for car owners, they have danger zone written all over them.  Which connotation can be applied to the products of Pine Technology? 

AnandTech's first experience with a Pine Tech motherboard was their ZX based ZA3, and while the experience wasn't a stellar one it did set the standard Pine Tech motherboards should live up to.  In the case of Pine's next contribution to the motherboard market, the dual processor BA1-D does have much higher standards to live up to if it is to become a successful product.  The dual processor motherboard market is a much more picky one than the single processor Socket-370 market, Pine does have one advantage going for them however, that advantage is price.

For a company that produced 5 million boards last year (not just motherboards, mainly modems and other such peripherals), Pine definitely has a strong background in the OEM market however their mainstream acceptance remains untested as a very small percentage of those 5 million boards made their way into the hands of hard core tweakers and gamers.  Is Pine due for a change?  There's only one way to find out...

AnandTech Report Card Rating
77/C

The Good

The BA1-D is your run-of-the-mill BX board with a second SC242 (Slot-1) processor interface and a SMP ASIC for dual processor operation.  Nothing more, no on-board ethernet, no on-board SCSI, just a dual processor BX board.  The benefits this type of design offers over the more conventional dual processor BX board with more server/workstation features in mind is that the BA1-D offers basic dual processor operation, at an affordable price.  To those users that can't afford SCSI hard drives, and don't need support for redundant power supplies, then the BA1-D gives them everything they need at an affordable cost. 

Contrary to Pine's own spec sheet, the BA1-D is not a jumperless motherboard.  The board, by default, performs a B21 state detect meaning it determines whether you are running a 66MHz or 100MHz FSB processor.  In the event that a 66MHz FSB processor is installed alongside a 100MHz FSB processor the board defaults to the 66MHz FSB, with no jumper that toggles between B21 states.  The board features no additional FSB settings other than the 66/100MHz settings officially supported by Intel for use with the BX chipset, the lack of any overclocking options can be expected considering that most OEMs, Pine's primary source of sales, don't really care about overclocking at all and would rather the potential not be there to save them any tech support calls from users asking why "the 133MHz setting crashed my computer."  The clock multipliers are controlled by an 8-pin jumper block adjacent to the secondary IDE connector.  The available documented settings range from 3.0x to 5.5x, unfortunately the BA1-D only comes with two jumpers for use on the 8 pins, so if you plan on using the 3x or 4x settings, make sure you have another jumper handy or have a tiny piece of metal to connect two more pins with.