Review of Socket 7 PCI Motherboards

ABit AB-TX5

ABit's newest TX chipset board, the AB-TX5, seems to inherit the crown of the AT boards most suited for overclockers and speed fans: It's fast, faster and the fastest. Featuring 'Soft Menu', it's very easy to adjust CPU clock ratio. External frequencies are supported up to 83 MHz, very stable by the way. Even the Pentium 233 MMX ran fine at 291 MHz and 3.2 Volts! It's good to see that the performance of the AB-PX5 was improved much more as well. This is my personal favorite TX board by the way. A new board must first be reliable and stable for me under all circumstances. And if it's fast, too, I got my candidate. ABit's TX5 board fits exactly my personal expectations. Please don't forget that there are more fine boards as well; before you make your choice, go ahead and read some other reviews as well. Maybe you will find some fact or feature you will regard even more important than I do.

Baby AT format; AT & ATX power supply; Intel 430TX; 3x ISA, 4x PCI; 4x SIMM, 2x DIMM; Award flash BIOS; 512 kB PB-Cache (6 ns); external frequencies: 50, 55, 60, 66, 75, 83 MHz; BF2 function not available, I/O chip: Winbond; busmaster Ultra DMA 2 or PIO 4 onboard; FDC onboard; 2x serial 16550; 1x EPP/ECP parallel; 1x PS/2 mouse (with connector); 1x USB (without connector); IrDA support; core voltages: 3.2V, 2.9V, 2.8V, 2.7V, 2.5V.

ABit AB-IT5H

This of all boards months ago was the first running perfectly even at 83 MHz bus speed. By the way, the memory timings were all switched to 'maximum warp' without errors. This means quite good performance under Windows 95; Windows NT is a bit slower, also the usage of a 6x86MX CPU. But its performance is comparable to some boards with the 430TX chipset! You will get 4 ISA / 4 PCI slots, 4 PS/2 slots and 2 DIMM slots (merely EDO-DIMMs, no SDRAM). The latest revision 2.0 now has switching regulators; if you should own a IT5H, don't think about upgrading to a TX chipset board, you probably won't get much more performance, especially in case you're using over 64 MB RAM.

Baby AT format; AT power supply; Intel 430HX; 4x ISA, 4x PCI; 4x SIMM, 2x DIMM (EDO!); Award flash BIOS; 512 kB PB-Cache (6 ns); external frequencies: 50, 55, 60, 66, 75, 83 MHz; BF2 function not available, I/O chip: ALi; busmaster DMA 2 or PIO 4 onboard; FDC onboard; 2x serial 16550; 1x EPP/ECP parallel; 1x PS/2 mouse (with connector); 1x USB (without connector); IrDA support; core voltages: 3.2V, 2.9V, 2.8V, 2.7V; two TAGRAMs for cacheable size of 512 MB