It's good to see that there is no BX board which would be noticable slower than others; if you want a BX board for a game computer without special hardware I would go for the cheapest brand board. The PnP issue could become a problem for all who want to equip their computer with all available add ons. Not every BIOS makes it possible to manually assign IRQs or disable the USB IRQ. Tom had already mentioned this problem half a year before in the last BX review, but it seems as if most manufacturers don't do sufficient or elaborate testing. Everybody who would fiddle around one hour with a lot of expansion cards would notice that the USB occupies an IRQ - no matter if you use it or not. And it's fairly annoying to find out that there's no way to change that!

The second thing I have to criticize is the poor support of large memory modules. If I get a BX board I want it to run with all available sizes of memory available. It's almost disappointing that a brand motherboard does not run with large memory modules or only recognizes a part of the original memory size... Some manufacturers have defused the memory issue by removing most options of changing the memory timings in the BIOS. Freaks and performance fanatics won't be happy with this, but risking system stability for a half per cent performance is not worth it.

Conclusion

The BX chipset has proved to be fast and flexible. Most manufacturers make even more of it by providing good motherboards. Slot 1 will be Intel's base socket of new CPUs for the next months, so you can expect that Katmai will run in every BX motherboard with just a BIOS update. On the other hand AMD has proved to be able to beat Intel's next generation processors and it's difficult to say which will be the fastest CPU in the beginning of 1999. We don't know what's about the future of Socket 7, but a good BX board is with a good future now since it's certain that Intel will remain at Slot 1. If you now want to build a computer which is meant to be quite up to date for a longer time, a BX board should be take into account.

Recommendations

Here's the list of the world's very best 440BX chipset motherboards!

• Asus P2B (compatibility, overclocking, support)
• AOpen AX6B (features, memory compatibilityy, overclocking, support)
• Chaintech 6BTM (memory compatibility)
• EPoX EP-61 BXA-M (features, performance)
• MSI MS-6119 (features, performance)

All boards have in common that they should run very problem free, fast and reliable. Support means that the manufacturer does a lot to fix known bugs by providing actual BIOSes regularly.