Board Revision: D

BIOS Version: 4B31 (February 2, 2000)

Q-Lity is quite an unusual name, just as it is unusual that it achieves great performance. Despite using the slower 693A chipset, the board reaches the scores of other 694X boards. It's even faster than some 694X motherboards. I don't want to play hide and seek, so here's the reason for those great results: The AGP bus runs at 2/3 FSB instead of only 1/2, making it run at 88 instead of 66 MHz. As you can see, this action is extremely effective in getting better performance. Nevertheless I would be careful: First you should only get this motherboard if you know for sure that your graphics card will support 88 MHz clock speed. Second I want to remind you that clocking a 694X motherboard this way will provide even better performance numbers.

The board can be easily recognized by the blue capacitors. It has five PCI as well as two ISA slots. Three DIMM sockets are waiting to be equipped with 512 MByte DIMMs for a maximum memory size of 1.5 GBytes. Of course you will get the common stuff like two serial ports as well as two USB ports, UltraDMA/66 controller, AGP 2x and the possibility to set the CPU speed in the Hardware Monitor Setup page of the AMI BIOS. You will also get the option to directly assign an IRQ to every PCI expansion slot.

You shouldn't be surprised to hear that this board doesn't feature any other bus speed than the standard 66, 100 or 133 MHz. The reason for this is the AGP bus, which is overclocked by default (to 88 MHz): Choosing, for example, 140 MHz instead of 133 would make the AGP run at 93 MHz. The probability that graphics cards will support such high bus clock speeds decreases with increasing FSB.

All connector labels are suited for beginners as well and a PC speaker has been included directly on the motherboard. Besides the fact that an overclocked board of course performs better, there is nothing really interesting with this board. During this test, the Q-Lity board ran very stable, but I cannot assure this for video cards other than the three tested.