Review of Slot 1 Motherboards with Intel 440BX Chipset - Spring 1998

Siemens D1064-E

Siemens' last motherboard 'Made in Germany' is quite a special one. It's the only board in the test which optionally comes with Matrox' G100 chip onboard, which means that it could possibly even be equipped with the G200 chip, since this chip is pin compatible to the G100. Other special features include a port for a chip card reader, a special dip switch for 'BIOS restore', which can save your life after an unsuccessful BIOS flash update. Additionally to the normal Wake up features it also offers 'Wake Up on Chip Card' and 'Keyboard Power On'.

The board ran stable with each of the tested PC100 SDRAM and it refuses to work with any SDRAM that identifies itself as PC66 SDRAM in its SDP EEPROM. The compatibility test was a very pleasant experience, since the D1064 didn't require any BIOS settings to pass all the tests.

This motherboard is certainly targeted to the corporate market, where overclocking features are not of any interest, but where easyness of use is the most important topic. This is what the D1064 does very well.

The board did not make it into the overall recommendations list because of its lack of overclocking features, its inability to run even good PC66 SDRAM and because of its only average performance. However, this motherboard could be very interesting for corporate use, especially in combination with the onboard MGA-G100 VGA chip.