Intel 845 Chipset Review & Motherboard Roundup: September 2001

ACorp 4S845A

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While we rarely hear about the manufacturer, our own Matthew Witheiler got a chance to visit ACorp in his most recent trip to Taiwan and only had words of high praise to say about the company's quality control practices.

The 4S845A was a pretty solid board with two unique qualities.  Like a few other motherboards in this roundup, the 4S845A features two BIOSes; one for backup should corruption or a bad flash render the primary BIOS useless.  However, if you look at the board snap shot about you've quickly realize that there's only one BIOS on the motherboard itself. 

ACorp accomplishes this by placing the second BIOS on a PCB inside what they call their Smart Panel II.  The Smart Panel II is a 5.25" placeholder that mounts in a regular drive bay and features diagnostic LEDs, two USB ports, a serial port and all of the on-board audio inputs/outputs.  This makes quickly plugging things into your computer much easier since you have access to these ports at the front of your case.  Along with all of those ports there is also a small red button.  This button allows you to switch between the primary BIOS on the motherboard and the backup BIOS located in the Smart Panel II.  The beauty of this is that you can recover from a corrupted BIOS image without even opening up your case.  The downside to this is, obviously, that the Smart Panel II occupies a drive bay. 

The motherboard itself only has one shortcoming and that is it only features 5 PCI slots (one is shared with a CNR slot).  This is compared to the 6 slots that competing boards offer; it's not a huge penalty but one worth noting. 

Like the ABIT BL7-RAID, the ACorp board also had some MP settings in the BIOS.  The BIOS was home to a completely jumperless configuration setup as has come to be expected of today's motherboards.