Socket 7 Board Review July 1998

A-Trend ATC-5220

ATX motherboard; VIA Apollo MVP3 chipset; 512 kB L2 cache; 2x ISA, 4x PCI; AGP slot; 3x DIMM voltges: 3.5V, 3.3V, 3.2V, 2.9V, 2.8V, 2.2V.

A-Trend sent us their actual ATX socket 7 motherboard. The most important settings are done with two dip switch blocks. The one for the bus clock is placed behind the AGP slot which means that you will have to remove the AGP card in case you wish to change the settings.

This board is only equipped with 512 kB 2nd level cache. This prevents this board to reach a very top performance; nevertheless it is one of the fastest among the 512 kB boards. I was able to run the Toshiba PC-66 SDRAM memory at 100 MHz; for a stable operation I had to reduce the memory timings, but a board running with memory clocked at 100 MHz and slow settings is normally faster than a 66 MHz memory system with fastest timings.

As with the Tyan motherboard the BIOS does not let you disable the power management completely.