Performance
We pushed each of these boards through our test suite just to make sure there weren't any hidden performance issues. From our experience with Intel based platforms usually the performance delta is fairly minimal across various manufacturers motherboards. We included AMD's own (not publicly available) Fester motherboard just for comparative purposes. Our test suite includes SYSmark98 (ran under Win98 & WinNT) to give us a since of business application performance, and to cover 3D graphics performance we ran Quake 3 Arena, Shogo, Descent 3, and Dogath Moore Zoological Gardens (DMZG). Each of the game titles were ran at both 640x480x16 and 1024x768x16. I only included the results for Descent 3 at 1024x768x16 only to show that at higher resolutions the video board becomes the bottleneck in turn causing all of the motherboards to achieve almost identical scores.
Business Application Performance Under Windows 98SE
Well its no surprise that the AMD platform is the fastest of the bunch. AMD has the ability to be aggressive in their memory timings since they build their own platforms and have tight control on what will be plugged into it (their own seed units). While each of these boards performed similarly the MSI takes the top spot with a score of 297 while the mysterious ASUS K7M grabs second.
