Since we received a pre-release board, the packaging and manual were not finalized.   We received our motherboard in a standard motherboard box, nicely packaged to avoid any shipping damage and a very attractive outer slip which had a 3D futuristic type motorcycle on it which will be very attractive to 3D gamers.

Our manual came in the form of a few 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper with a picture of the motherboard and all its connectors and DIP switch settings for the various processor speeds. PowerColor should have a nice and fully complete manual ready for when it ships.

The board layout of the DREAMCODE is pretty much the same as most other BX motherboards with a few  exceptions.  The ATX power connector is located behind the Slot-1 but a bit more to the right which makes it a bit better than the BH6.  The IDE and Floppy connectors are very well placed right at the edge of the board, I am glad PowerColor chose not to stack them right above one another like most other motherboard manufacturers.  The TNT, its memory modules and the Yamaha XG 724/740 are where the AGP and first PCI slot usually are which means that this board has no AGP slot and only 3 PCI slots.  The fact that there is no AGP slot might worry you a bit because upgradability will be hindered if you are planning on keeping this motherboard a long time.  But, if you look at it this way, by the time the next generation of video cards come out with AGP 4X, you'll probably want a new motherboard based on the camino chipset to run it on so the TNT on this board will last you quite a while.  The good thing about the TNT also, is that it does scale quite nicely with higher processor speeds, so even if you upgrade your processor, the TNT will still provide high framerates well into the future.

If you're used to installing motherboards, then this one will also be very easy for you to install, in fact possibly easier since there is no video card or sound card to install.  We encountered absolutely no difficulties while installing this motherboard.  We simply screwed it into the backplate of our AOpen HX-45 ATX case, connected the power supply cables, connected the HDD, Power LED's, reset switch and we were almost done.  To set the speed of the CPU, PowerColor chose to go with DIP switches.  While not as easy as Abit's Softmenu II, its a lot easier than using jumpers.  Let me just say that jumpers are terribly annoying!  There are two separate DIP panel's with 4 switches each, one allows for changing multiplier speed and the other allows you to change the FSB speed between the following options:  66, 75, 83, 100, 112 and 133.

This brings us to a bad point about DreamCode; its not the greatest for overclockers.  Due to the fact that it's limited in the possible FSB choices, overclockers will have a hard time getting the most out of their CPU's with this board.  Also, PowerColor has not provided any voltage tweaking ultility or DIP switches to increase voltage so there's another hurdle for overclockers. Luckily, our Celeron 300A does not require any voltage increase to make it 450 stably, so this was not a problem for us.

The PowerColor DREAMCODE comes with the following software:

• Full version of WARGASM
• WinDVD Software DVD Player
• YAMAHA XGStudio Player
• YAMAHA XGStudio Mixer
• YAMAHA Audio Player -- YStation
• XG enhanced game demo
• PowerColor Power Install Tool
• PowerColor Web Update tool

Our CD didn't come with Wargasm, but according the coverage I've seen on it, it looks very good.   We also had a chance to test out the Yamaha XGStudio and YStation.  The Midi from the XG chip is among the best I've ever heard, even rivaling the SB Live!  I played around with the Yamaha software a bit to test out the Midi effects and wow is it neat.  The DVD player is a standard software based DVD player and that just about wraps up the software bundle.  They did provide drivers for both the TNT and the Yamaha XG 724/740 but I found them to be outdated, so I grabbed the newest ones off the web.

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