Introduction
Intel’s 440LX chipset is now available for almost 2 weeks and one mainboard manufacturer after the other is presenting their 440LX board to the market. The most well known new feature of this new Intel chipset is the AGP (Advanced Graphics Port) support, which is supposed to revolutionize the graphic accelerator market. There are a few other important new features as well however, which are supposed to increase the performance of a Pentium II system over the performance of systems with the old 440FX chipset, which so far was the only available chipset for Pentium II processors. The most important feature besides AGP is the new memory manager, which now supports SDRAM as well. SDRAM doesn’t necessarily have to increase overall system performance considerably, but particularly the AGP needs as much memory bandwidth as it can get. The current maximal peak bandwidth of SDRAM at 66 MHz system bus is about 528 MB/s, EDO RAM only offers 264 MB/s and good old FPM even only 176 MB/s peak bandwidth. This shows that it really requires SDRAM if AGP wants at least to use x1 mode (264 MB/s). The 440LX chipset is including the PIIX4 ‘south bridge’, well known from the 430TX chipset, enabling UltraDMA mode for EIDE disks and LDCM for all the (few) people who fancy that.
In most of the LX-boards that are currently sold you’ll still find the ‘secret’ on the chipset.
More and more LX boards are coming in and the performance picture is changing a little bit. There seem to be two groups of boards, the fast and the slow ones, each group having very similar test results, but a gap of about 1.5 Winstone points between these groups. The new Soyo SY-6KB together with MSI’s MS-6111 are for now building the fast group. A special group are the two dual CPU boards from Supermicro and Tyan. These boards impress with their features rather than with raw performance. However if anyone decides to buy a special dual Pentium II board he will probably not pay that much attention to half a Winstone more or less.
For comparison reasons I ran the PCI tests on an AOpen AX6F as well, acting for all 440FX boards. You may remember that the AX6F is one of the fastest 440FX boards available.
Abit LX6
Finally Abit’s back!!! It seems long ago that I wrote a particular good review about a newly released Abit board. Since the release of the first and most excellent IT5H Socket 7 HX board the expectations in Abit were pretty high, leaving Abit under huge stress trying to live up to the standards of the IT5H. It took almost exactly a year, but now Abit’s done it again. The LX6 was a pleasure to do testing with and it performed excellent in every test. It holds the lead in most of the benchmarks and is worth a big recommendation. The board is not a cheap and tiny little thing, it’s only using high quality components, comes with the well known SoftMenuTM feature, which leaves you the bus speed options of 50 to 100 (!!) MHz. However, before you are jumping out of your seat, let me tell you that the 100 MHz setting produced 66 MHz bus speed. This can change with a BIOS update though. Anyway this LX board is my number one choice, don’t go for less !
Features: 1 AGP, 4 PCI, 3 ISA slots, 4 DIMM sockets,SoftMenuTM , ATX form factor.
AOpen AX6L
As usual was AOpen one of the first motherboard manufacturers to finish a board with a new chipset. The AX6L is unfortunately not able to continue being one of the fastest Pentium II boards as initiated with the AX6F. The AX6L is an average performer with no special highlights or downsides. As the TX boards from AOpen it offers nice features like ‘Suspend to Disk’, ‘Modem Ring On’ and LDCM, but it is a little bit particular about the BIOS revision of an Adaptec 2940. It has to be the latest (1.25) revision of the BIOS if you want to use it in the AX6L. Since it’s no real big deal to implement it and one company, who read my bus speed project religiously, is making big bucks with this feature so far, AOpen is jumping on the 75/83 MegaHz Pentium II Bus Speed Trend Train and offers these two bus speeds in addition to 66 and 68.5 MHz. I personally don’t believe in this feature in terms of performance compared to instability issues, but if you want to overclock your Pentium II up to 337 MHz, this is the easiest way to achieve it. My Pentium II 266 runs just fine at 337 MHz in this board and here you can take advantage of AGP as well. The bus speed as well as the multiplier for the CPU clock can be adjusted from the BIOS, hence there’s a SoftMenu like feature from AOpen now. The AX6L comes with 4 DIMM slots, no SIMM slots, one AGP, 4 PCI and 3 ISA slots. The board is in ATX form factor.
Asus P2L97
The first two things that striked me when looking at Asus’ P2L97 was the small size of the board as well as the existance only three DIMM slots on it. This board was obviously not manufactured for any high end systems but rather for ‘entry level AGP systems‘ (if antything like that should exist). The board comes with a softmenu like feature for adjusting the CPU parameters like bus speed and multiplier as well as with a CPU/motheboard fan/temp/voltage monitoring for use with the LDCM. The jumperless softmenu feature allows you to choose your bus speed and multiplier setting from the BIOS as known from Abit’s motherboards since 1996. You can choose the bus speed from 50 (!??) up to 83 MHz so that the door is wide open for overclocking, just as in the Abit, AOpen and Chaintech LX boards. The performance of the P2L97 is not outstanding by any means. It’s not slow enough to be one of the slowest, but certainly not fast enough to be in the fast league of the LX boards either. All in all I am pretty disappointed with this board from a well known manufacturer as Asus. Only 3 DIMM sockets, only two ISA slots, no great performance … Asus has done better in the past, the last outstanding Asus board is now more than a year old.
The P2L97 is an ATX board with 3 DIMM sockets, 5 PCI, 2 ISA and one AGP slot.
Chaintech 6LTM
FIC KL-6011
The KL-6011 showed some strange results with Diamonds Fire GL 1000 Pro, where the PCI version of this card ran particularly slow or the AGP version particularly fast. Tests with the good old Millennium PCI card showed that the KL-6011 is really not performing too great with PCI cards. With the AGP version of NVidia’s Riva 128 reference board it was a little faster than the AOpen AX6L under NT, but slower and hence the slowest under Windows 95. The board takes sometimes up to 4 minutes to recognize a SCSI card, but after you waited patiently for this time, everything works as normal.
The KL-6011 is equipped with only 3 DIMM slots, which is hard for me to comprehend, so that you can’t use more than 192 MB SDRAM currently. It comes with 1 AGP, 5 PCI and 2 ISA slots and is in ATX form factor.
Microstar International (MSI) MS-6111
The MS-6111 from MSI is quite a bit of a surprise. I never came across a board that was such an obvious performance leader amongst competitors with the very same technology. As I know from fellow hardware testers no 440LX board could so far reach the performance of the MS-6111 and this although it’s also just using the 440LX chipset and no special features at all. It is almost regardless which benchmark you’re running, it always scores the highest results and that with quite a distance to the other boards. The only exception to this rule is the Highend Winstone 97 under NT, where for some reasons the AOpen AX6L is faster.
The board comes with 4 DIMM slots, no SIMM slots, 1 AGP slot, 4 PCI slots and 3 ISA slots and is also an ATX form factor board.
Shuttle HOT-631
The new HOT-631 from Shuttle is a decent average board. It comes with the sensible four DIMM slots and offers four PCI and three ISA slots in addition to the AGP slot. The AGP performance isn’t particularly outstanding, but still not too far away from the fast competitors, the PCI performance is average under Windows 95, very good under NT though. All in all is this board in more or less par with the AOpen AX6L. It offers 75 and 83 MHz bus speed very officially, since the jumper settings are printed on the board. The HOT-631 was running fine with all kinds of SDRAM types I used. You are certainly not making any wrong decision buying this ATX board.
Soyo SY-6KB
The new Soyo board that I already tested as pre release version about 6 weeks ago has got quite mature and is under Windows NT the new performance leader, separating it from the slowest board by no less than 2.1 Winstone points under Windows NT. Although this board doesn’t use as many tantalum capacitors as the Tyan or Supermicro boards it’s using electrolytic capacitors with the temp spec of up to 105°C instead of only 85°C as e.g. the MSI board does. This higher temperature ‘resistance’ slows down the aging of the capacitor considerably and should therefore perform just as well as the tantalum capacitors. The board gives a well made impression and is using dip switches for the CPU multiplier adjustment instead of jumpers, just as the MSI board does as well. It also shares with the MSI MS-6111 the inability to run at more than 66 MHz bus speed, but I guess you know that I am not thinking much of that feature anyhow.
4 DIMM slots, no SIMM slots, 1 AGP, 3 PCI, 3 ISA slots, ATX form factor.
Supermicro P6DLS
The P6DLS from Supermicro is quite an impressive motherboard, which you can already see at its size. Supermicro is one of the few world wide motherboard manufacturers with a long experience in dual CPU boards and this one comes with an additional ultra wide SCSI port. The board uses Adaptec’s 
, well known from the Adaptec 2940UW controller. The AMI BIOS gives you the ability to switch on or off this feature and if you are using the onboard SCSI host adapter it will of course require one interrupt. In my benchmarks the onboard SCSI was slightly faster than my default DPT SCSI host adapter.
The performance of the P6DLS is neither outstanding nor bad, but if you want to go for a dual board you may be more interested in the features and quality of the board anyhow. As usual for Supermicro the quality is immaculate and except for the IDE and floppy connectors it’s only using high quality part. The only thing I don’t understand is why Supermicro can’t use the much more convenient dip switches instead of jumpers.
As for all the later Supermicro boards it’s supporting bus speeds of 75 as well as 83 MHz, although the latter is undocumented and pretty pointless since the onboard SCSI wouldn’t work at this bus speed anymore. Nevertheless is 75 MHz bus speed always good for overclocking a PII 300 to 337.5 MHz and therefore certainly kind of useful.
As you can see the board comes with two Slot 1 sockets, 1 wide SCSI connector, 1 SCSI-2 connector, 4 DIMM sockets, 1 AGP, 4 PCI and 3 ISA slots and it’s in ATX form factor. If you want to get a dual CPU LX board this one is certainly worth considering.
Undocumented 83 MHz Setting:
JC3 — Off | JC2 — On | JC1 — On
Tyan Thunder 2 S1696D
The Tyan Thunder 2 is the monster board in this review. As you can see above it’s really kind of huuuuuge!!! It’s another dual PII board, but it also comes with an
controller chip, supplying the board with two independent (!!!) ultra wide SCSI channels in case you want to use 28 SCSI devices. That’s not all, it also has the Yamaha OPL4 sound chip onboard, offering you a nice sound support as well as a joystick port. I guess you won’t mind that the board has only 2 ISA slots instead of three. The quality of the board is as immaculate as usual, Tyan even made it to use proper IDE and floppy connectors after I complained about them several times. The young BIOS of this board is also typical for Tyan, being kinda naughty in several occasions, e.g. getting ‘soft off’ to work or disabling and then re-enabling the onboard SCSI which takes several new bootups until it works. However this will probably get sorted out soon. The performance is unfortunately not as published on Tyan’s website. The Thunder 2 is more or less pretty much as fast as the Supermicro with a very slight lead of the Supermicro P6DLS. This is not good for more than an average overall performance rating. The real reason for buying this board should be pure megalomania though, because who else is offering all these features and so much motherboard surface for the money. If I had to compare the Supermicro and the Tyan board with cars I’d say that the P6DLS is the BMW and the Thunder 2 is the Jaguar. A Jag is a great car with a whole lot of style, but not quite as agile and reliable as a BMW. Let’s say the Thunder 2 is ‘the LX board with an attitude‘. 😉
Features: 2 Slot 1 sockets, 2 wide SCSI connectors, 1 SCSI-2 connector, 1 speaker out, 1 line in, 1 micro in, 1 game port, 4 DIMM, 1 AGP, 4 PCI, 1 Adaptec RAID slot, 2 ISA, ATX form factor.
Tyan Thunder 2 S1692DL
AOpen AX6F
Just for showing the performance increase of 440LX over 440FX boards I’ve tested the AX6F again. This board uses Intel’s 440FX chipset and showed to be one of the fastest boards with this chipset. It’s coming with 4 SIMM slots, 5 PCI and 3 ISA slots. ATX form factor.
Windows 95 Performance
Comparing 440FX with 440LX boards shows that there is a performance lead of the 440LX boards indeed. This lead isn’t much, but particularly the High End Winstone 97 scores significantly higher on a 440LX board, probably due to the increased usage of memory, which most of the high end applications require. If main memory has to be accessed instead of L2 cache, the SDRAM architecture has a speed advantage over EDO.
The fastest three boards in almost all tests are obviously the Abit LX6, the Soyo SY-6KB and the MSI MS-6111, with a slight lead of the Abit board in most of the tests except the AGP graphic highend benchmark.
Windows NT Performance
The NT benchmarks show little difference to the ones ran under Windows 95. The best performers are the Abit LX6, the Soyo SY-6KB and the MSI MS-6111, with the Shuttle HOT-631 breaking this rule with its fairly strong performance in the PCI tests.
3D Benchmarks Windows 95
The best AGP graphic performance is offered by Abit’s LX6 and MSI’s MS-6111. These two are the only ones with a 3D Winmark of 262, leaving a gap of at least 3 points to the rest of the field.
Summary
All in all there’s three boards to look out for:
- Abit LX6
- MSI MS-6111
- Soyo SY-6KB
The Abit LX6 board is holding most of the number one placings in all these benchmarks and can hence be seen as the No. 1 LX Single CPU Board. If it comes to quality, Abit’s LX6 and Soyo’s SY-6KB are offering you more than the MSI board and if you should have difficulties choosing between Abit LX6 and Soyo SY-6KB, maybe the convenient SoftMenuTM feature of the Abit LX6 will ease your decision.
