Introduction
The mainboard is possibly the most important part of the computer. It manages all transactions of data between CPU and the peripherals. It houses the CPU and its second level cache, the chipset, the BIOS, main memory, I/O chips, ports for keyboard, serial I/O, parallel I/O ,disks and plug-in cards.
The first decision you have to make before buying a motherboard is nowadays which CPU and then which chipset you’re gonna use. So probably it’s best to first refer to the Chipset Guide. The next thing is to choose the manufacturer. There’s no doubt about it – you really should go for a brand motherboard, preferably a brand that’s present on the web, because that is by far the best way to get the latest Flash BIOS update, drivers and information about the board you might require.
New Testing Policy
I’ve started motherboard testing and publishing on the Internet roughly two years ago now and I think it’s about time for taking this testing into the next phase. Whilst in the past I focussed on the performance aspect of motherboards, now I think other topics are at least as important as well.
The difference in motherboard performance between the ‘slowest’ and the ‘fastest’ boards does nowadays hardly exceed the 3% range anymore, so that recommendations purely based on performance get pretty close to bean counting. What counts much more to the users and system integrators as well as the large OEMs is the usebility of a motherboard.
In the past I came across a lot of problems myself, as well as I received a lot of mail from confused readers. A typical example is the pretty common difficulty of getting several PCI or ISA cards to work in a motherboard, something that is getting even worse when there are already more than two of these cards running in the system. E.g. Abit’s LX6 board, which became so famous for overclocking, was a nightmare when you wanted to use more than only an AGP graphics card in the system. Problems started latest when one decided to plug in SCSI and/or network cards as well.
Add-Ons
It is becoming pretty common to use a few more cards in your system than only a graphics card. A gaming system without a modem, ISDN or network card is certainly not worth being called a gaming system anymore, simply due to the fact that the only real gaming experience is generated by multiplayer games, my beloved Quake II is only one of many many others. Hence it’s not out of the world if I expect that any network card should work flawlessly in any motherboard.
People who buy expensive Pentium II systems are certainly making a smart move when investing in SCSI rather than EIDE. SCSI still offers the highest disk performance, a great upgradeability for e.g. CDROMs, CD-recorders, scanners, streamers, … and last but not least a very low trouble level. Thus I do appreciate if motherboards that are targeted towards expensive high end systems have got a SCSI adapter already onboard, a RAIDport is even better, and it’s almost perfect if it’s even Adaptec’s latest U2W SCSI adapter, as e.g. on DFI’s new BX board. The least I would expect however, is that any SCSI adapter runs flawlessly in any board.
A sound system is nowadays a basic component of any PC. Thus I’d appreciate if there’s either a decent sound system onboard or the board works fine with older ISA soundcards as well as the new PCI soundcards. In case of the latter it’s useful having the new ‘SBLink’ onboard, which enables compatibility to the old ISA Soundblaster standard.
All in all do I think it’s not really asked too much that a modern motherboard can host all these components together at the same time. If it doesn’t, it may be as fast as it wants, it will still be pretty useless for any home or office user, system integrator or OEM.
Stability
Another requirement of a motherboard is certainly the stability. In the most cases boards become instable when they cannot work properly with the RAM that’s plugged in. As we are fast moving towards the 100 MHz system bus as a standard, memory problems will become a lot more common. It can easily be that a board only works reliably with RAM of only a few memory vendors, other boards were designed and tested better, so that you can throw virtually any memory at it, as long as it applies to the basic specifcations.
One way of testing this out is of course overclocking. If the board is running stable at a higher system bus than what it was designed for, it will most likely be rock stable at the specified system clock. However, testing a board to the limits is very difficult, because no board manufacturer and neither any CPU manufacturer would tell you which instructions are most sensitive to timing problems and overclocking.
So it’s virtually impossible saying that a board or a CPU run absolutely stable at a particular clock speed, because it is very likely that the really touchy procedures haven’t been ran at all. This means for the reader that you of course can be lucky as long as you are not using these procedures on your system, but it could as well be that you are using particularly the very software that will cause a crash in a board that was testified as stable.
Overclocking
Since I started making overclocking to a kind of mass movement, everyone seems to be doing it and quite a few are simply overclocking their system for the sake of it, putting any sensibility aside. I certainly don’t have a problem with this, as long as people don’t generate false expectations by publishing astronomical overclocking results all over the web, stating how reliable it is.
This is a pain for anybody who is doing business with hardware, sometimes even software products, because a lot of people think that overclocking is the most natural thing in the world and they come to completely wrong conclusions.
I would like giving you a quick example. I recently received a mail, where the sender asked me for help in an interesting matter. He had bought a Diamond Monster II add-on 3D card and after installation of the drivers the system crashed and wouldn’t run properly anymore until he removed these drivers. He concluded that the drivers from Diamond are the source of all evil, screwing up his Windows registry. He had already contacted Diamonds support, complaining about this ‘ridiculous product’. Diamond didn’t understand what was wrong and so he came to me for help.
When I asked him about his system it turned out that he had an overclocked CPU. Now I have never come across any 3D card driver that would screw up the registry and lead to crashes unless there was something wrong with the hardware of the system. Thus I asked him to switch the clock of his CPU back to what it is supposed to and try installing the drivers again. He got back to me letting me know that everything was running fine now.
I hope that this shows you that overclocking isn’t just a ‘cool thing’ which is simply supposed to work. It’s fine if people have to publish their 500+ MHz PII systems, maybe they get something out of it, but please don’t think that running one software on an overclocked system without problems means that any software will do that. If you run into problems, please set your clock back before trying anything else. If this fixes the problem, you know that you simply cannot overclock to this speed. Basta!
Summary
So I do admit, the situation if a board offers overclocking or not is certainly also something to look at, but I guess that the majority of people want stable systems, so that systems without bus speeds above spec will also have a chance.
I’d like to mention something about this too. I am indeed a friend of overclocking, but I’m not a friend of bus speeds that get the PCI and AGP clock too much out of spec anymore. We have now got the advantage of 100 MHz bus clock, leaving the PCI bus at 33 MHz and the AGP clock at 66 MHz as it should be. I can’t help it that I simply can’t see a reason for 83 Mhz bus speed anymore, at least not in Pentium II AGP systems. 92 MHz are completely crazy, since hardly any AGP card will do this properly. The same applies to bus clocks beyond 112 MHz.
Finally, the features of a board should be pointed out as well. I already mentioned onboard SCSI, network adapter and sound, but there are other things too. System monitoring can be an issue for people and it’s certainly not wrong if a board is equipped with it. It can tell you if your fan stopped working, if your power supply fails or if your CPU gets too hot.
The new wake up features maybe worth a look at too, because it can save you from leaving your system running permanently, thus saving energy. Wake up on ring, on LAN and also on clock are features that I do appreciate. These features are used best in combination with the ‘suspend to disk’ feature, as well known from notebooks. AOpen is one of the few manufacturers who have this feature implememted into their boards for more than a year now. It starts your system exactly the same way you left it. The same programs are running, the same data is still there.
The long term reliability of a motherboard can unfortunately not be tested by me or any other hardware reviewer, it’s up to you giving me input on this topic. The same applies to the product support and in some way also to manufacturer’s warrantry. The length of the warrantry is not neccesarily what’s mainly important, what counts is how much use you can make of it after running into problems.
The above said leads to the following new evaluation scheme for motherboards in exactly this order:
- Compatibility and Reliability (AGP, PCI, ISA cards, BIOS, RAM)
- Features (onboard features and overclocking abilities)
- Performance (office performance and gaming performance)