Motherboard Comparison Epox EP-7KXA vs. Asus K7V

Test Setup

I thought it would be best to use the Giga-Athlon for the test, since its power hunger would stress the boards particularly hard. I tried two different PC133 DIMMs, one 128 MB CL2 DIMM from Crucial Technologies (Micron) and one 128 MB CL2 HSDRAM DIMM from Enhanced Memory Systems. Both DIMMs are excellent performers in terms of reliability.

For the benchmarks I still used Sysmark 2000, although I've got my doubts that this benchmark is particularly useful for a motherboard evaluation. The office applications used in this benchmark are hardly able to stress the memory, and they leave the AGP completely alone. Therefore you can hardly spot performance differences between boards with Sysmark and you still don't know if your memory and AGP performs stable. I added Quake 3 Arena, Expendable and SPECviewperf 6.1.1 to the benchmark suite, because those applications make heavy usage of the memory and the AGP. Especially SPECviewperf will easily crash a system with instable memory. It can also point out performance deltas of the memory system and the AGP very well.