Three boards do additionally have a Socket 370 (DFI, Jetway and Tyan). Of course they are no dual boards, which means that you can either use Slot-1 or Socket 370 . All boards have at least three DIMM sockets each, four PCI slots and one ISA slot. Most candidates using the 694X North Bridge do also have the AMR slot (Audio Modem Riser).

Award Modular BIOS is absolutely dominating. Only Gigabyte, MSI and Q-Lity use a Megatrends BIOS (AMI). However, there are two types of Award BIOS. Most 693A boards use older versions, while some others make use of the latest version 6.0.

It's great to see that everybody is making use of switching voltage regulators to reduce heat emissions. After all, fast CPUs and graphic cards are hot enough. Coloured status LEDs seem to be absolutely "in", so that many boards have one (Chaintech, DFI, FIC, Gigabyte, Tekram). Only MSI features a diagnostic LED system that makes it possible to trace every step during system startup.

Only four boards are basically not a good choice for overclocking : Eüpa, FIC, Lucky Star and Tyan. They do not allow an arbitary bus speed grade (66/100/133) to be set up, so that you will hardly get a 100 MHz CPU running at 133 MHz. Example: A Pentium IIIE 700 will be identified as 100 MHz type, thus the board uses the PCI divider 1/3 and AGP divider 2/3. Even if you raise the bus speed afterwards to 133 MHz, those boards will keep these dividers! So your AGP will run at 88 MHz as well as the PCI bus at 44 MHz. Maybe this cosmetic bug can be fixed with a BIOS update or with the 'A14'-procedure, which is the 100 to 133 MHz FSB operation comparable to the well known B21-procedure that does the 66 to 100 MHz FSB change.