Abit AN6
The Abit AN6 is the first Slot One board I’ve ever seen and considering its age of almost 5 months it’s doing a pretty good job. However, this board cannot be recommended right now, because I was completely unable to run any SCSI host adapter on this board, which is certainly a crucial thing in this class. I will receive a new board as well as a new BIOS revision very soon and then I’m sure it will run with SCSI disks just as well.
Due to the fact that my NT test system comes on a SCSI HDD (Seagate Cheetah), I couldn’t test this board under NT. The Windows 95 benchmark results are pretty good however, so that we can hope of a good NT performance once the SCSI problem is sorted out.
Another special thing about this board is that in its SoftMenu you can choose 75 MHz bus speed, which so far is unique amongst the Slot One boards. However my tests under Windows 95 at 75 MHz bus speed didn’t show any significant performance advantage over the 66 MHz bus speed, which will most likely be due to the Level 2 cache of the Pentium II, that runs at 1/2 the CPU speed and is hence ,unlike on Socket 7 boards, independend from the bus speed.
This Intel 440FX chipset board is in ATX form factor and comes with 4 PCI, 3 ISA, 4 SIMM, 2 DIMM (only for FPM/EDO/BEDO!!) slots, cacheable area is as in all other Pentium II or Pentium Pro carrying boards 1 GB, it supports ECC, no Ultra-DMA and comes with a switching voltage regulator (standard in PPro/PII boards)
AOpen AX6F
This is the one I used for the Pentium II review and the reason for that is quite simple, it’s the fastest Slot One board I’ve tested so far. Under NT it’s now reached by the Tyan S1682, but under Windows 95 it’s still the leader of the Slot One boards that found their way in my lab yet. There is not much more to say about this board, it’s a good performer and the only complaint I’ve got is that you really have to look closely, to find only a few tantalum capacitors. This is a quality issue and is better in all the other Slot One boards I’ve tested.
This Intel 440FX chipset board is in ATX form factor and comes with 5 PCI, 3 ISA, 4 SIMM slots, cacheable area is as in all other Pentium II or Pentium Pro carrying boards 1 GB, it supports ECC, no Ultra-DMA and comes with a switching voltage regulator (standard in PPro/PII boards)
Shuttle HOT-623
This board is just an average fellow. No highlights, no great performance, but it’s reliable and probably it will have an attractive price too. What I really like about this board is that it comes with 8 SIMM sockets instaed of only 4, which is definitely too few for a board in this class. I also always enjoy the Shuttle manuals with the little stickers in it. 😉
This Intel 440FX chipset board is in ATX form factor and comes with 5 PCI, 3 ISA, 8 SIMM slots, cacheable area is as in all other Pentium II or Pentium Pro carrying boards 1 GB, it supports ECC, no Ultra-DMA and comes with a switching voltage regulator (standard in PPro/PII boards)
Tyan S1682
This board, called ‘Tahoe’ was a moody fellow and took me about ten times the time for testing than the three above boards. The first sample I received was running far from stable and took my NT as well as my Win95 test configurations several times with it in its death. The Award BIOS it came with wasn’t exactly improving this behavior. So the next thing I received was a new AMI BIOS, which still couldn’t cure the problems. Eventually I got a complete new board and what a surprise, it was working flawlessly at last!!!
The S1682 is something quite special, since its the first dual Pentium II board I’ve seen. The performance of it is equal to the performance of the AOpen AX6F and hence No.1 under Windows NT. Under Windows 95 it’s not quite as fast, but still fairly close to the leader as well. It is very well equipped, coming with the decent amount of 8 SIMM sockets and even from far you can see that this board is packed with tantalum capacitors. This shows that unless Asus or AOpen, Tyan is not trying to save production cost with cheaper board components, and as far as I was told, this board is priced very aggressively, although it’s a dual board.
Hence for me the Tyan S1682 is the most interesting Slot One board that’s currently available. Fast, good quality and even expandable to a dual CPU system for a really attractive price. I only wished I wouldn’t have had so much trouble with the pre-production sample I received first.
This Intel 440FX chipset board is in ATX form factor and comes with 5 PCI, 3 ISA, 8 SIMM slots, cacheable area is as in all other Pentium II or Pentium Pro carrying boards 1 GB, it supports ECC, no Ultra-DMA and comes with a switching voltage regulator (standard in PPro/PII boards)
Benchmark Results
Since it’s a little touchy keeping the Intel Pentium II 266 cool at 300 MHz, I’ve only used it at it’s default clock speed of 266 MHz.
Performance of Slot One Boards at 66 MHz Bus Speed under Windows 95
Performance of Slot One Boards at 66 MHz Bus Speed under Windows NT
The Abit AN6 doesn’t currently run with any SCSI controller. Abit is aware of the problem and is working with high pressure on it. This board is also able to run at 75 MHz bus speed. Results at this bus speed will follow as soon as the SCSI problem is sorted out, but so far the effects of 75 MHz bus speed are fairly disappointing.
