Now we get down to our final opinions as a result of the extensive reviews carried out - no doubt you will have your own requirements from the motherboard you use, we set out below which boards fared better in different areas.
Best/Fastest Boards
My favorites in this review are Soltek SL-67KV, TMC TI6VG4 and Asus P3V4X. All three offer excellent performance and useful features. The Asus comes with 6 PCI master slots instead of the AMR, perfect stability, best performance and excellent conditions for overclocking. Soltek provides four USB ports, AMR and also works rock stable like the Asus. The same can be said for the TMC board, I just want to mention the excellent design again. These three motherboards support ECC and proved to be very reliable and fast.
Winner among the 693A motherboards is the Transcend TS-AVD1. It is no feature king, but is extremely stable and fast.
Flexibility Winners
The Tyan S1854 can only be recommended if performance is not your primary requirement. Six PCI slots and the option to use a FCPGA CPU without requiring an adapter card as well as the comfortable FSB auto detection make this board quite attractive. Four fan headers provide enough cooling options. Moreover, the board did not cause any problems during the test.
DFI TA64 . This one doesn't have as much slots and fan headers, but it is the only one which is able to run a FCPGA-Pentium III. All other hybrid boards of this review can only cope with Intel's Celeron. It comes with four USB ports and an integrated sound system . Performance and stability finalize its list of benefits.
Overclocking Boards
The best boards for overclocking come from Soltek, Asus and AOpen. FIC and Chaintech do also represent great overclocking platforms, but I'm not going to recommend products, which did not convince me as a result of to stability issues.
- Introduction
- AGP, IDE-Controller, Memory Interface
- The Chipsets
- Test Setup
- Feature Overview
- A-Trend ATC6240V
- AOpen AX64 Pro
- Asus P3V4X
- Azza PT-6VAX2
- Chaintech 6ATA4
- DFI TA64
- Eüpa VP1
- FIC KA11
- Gigabyte GA-6VX-4X
- IWill VD133
- Jetway 994AN-L
- Lucky Star 6VA693A
- MSI MS-6199
- Q-Lity P3V-T
- RioWorks PSVA
- Shuttle AV61
- Soltek SL-67KV
- Tekram P6PRO-AU
- TMC TI6VG4
- Transcend TS-AVD1
- Tyan S1854 Trinity 400
- Motherboard Feature Comparison Table
- The Benchmarks: SYSmark 2000 - Windows 98 SE
- The Benchmarks: SYSmark 2000 - Windows NT 4.0
- The Benchmarks: Direct 3D Performance - Expendable Timedemo
- The Benchmarks: OpenGL Performance - Quake III Arena
- Recommendations
- Final Thoughts