BCM QS750 Athlon Motherboard Review — THG.RU

Introduction

In our last Early Athlon Motherboard Review I discussed the lack of marketing drive given by the majority of the motherboard manufacturers who have developed Athlon supported boards. We can now add another courageous company to the «I proudly support AMD’s Athlon!» list, BCM. I’m happy to see that BCM, BIOSTAR and FIC are proudly wagging their tails instead of burying them between their legs. Although most of these boards share a very similar set of features, it is nice to see that more manufacturers are slowly joining the Athlon cause. Since AMD is finally playing hardball with the almighty Intel, staying ahead of them in the processor frequency game with the newly released 750MHz Athlon. I believe we will start seeing Athlon’s motherboard support grow. Competition is definitely good!

About the BCM QS750

Ever since we posted the last Athlon motherboard review we have been receiving a lot of requests to review the BCM QS750 as well. I was amazed by how many people out there are searching far and wide for more Athlon supported platforms. The QS750 board actually arrived at our lab just days after we posted the last review. So why did it take so long? Well, unfortunately I could not get the QS750 to run stable in my configuration until just recently. During my initial time with the board I came up with my own list of names for the product. Needless to say none of them remotely looked like «QS750» :). The problem I encountered with the board was intermittent lockups once entering Windows 98SE and sometimes even during post. I went through the standard set of troubleshooting including; different power supplies, memory DIMMs, CPUs, peripherals, etc… It turned out that the board would run like a top as long as I kept the frequency at/or below 650MHz. I talked with BCM about my problems and they confirmed that had some BIOS issues and were working on the problem. Just a couple days after my conversation with BCM I received a new beta BIOS which has my QS750 board running like a champ at 700MHz & 750MHz. BCM is currently putting the new BIOS through their qualification/compatibility tests and will be releasing this new BIOS soon on their web.

Motherboard features

Each of the boards offers a very similar set of features: 3 memory slots, AGP slot, 2 serial, 1 parallel, PS2 mouse & keyboard, and two USB ports. Only two of the other boards offer any kind of built in overclockability. I will focus on the BCM QS750 board’s features in this review. Please refer to our Early Athlon Motherboard Review to get the low-down on the other motherboards.

The QS750 has one unique attribute in its feature list. It is the only board that we have tested, which includes 4 PCI slots and 3 ISA slots. So if in your list of requirements is the availability of 3 ISA slots, look no further, because the BCM board is the only Athlon board that has them. You do however give up a precious PCI slot due to this.

Overclockability

The BCM platform does offer an option in the BIOS to up the FSB to 133MHz. However, they should completely remove this option in the BIOS. I tried it out, but changing the option from 100/33 to 133/33 had no effect on performance. The MSI 6167 platform used to also have the same option in their BIOS. MSI has recently removed this option. So if you are looking for an Athlon based overclockable board you will have to look elsewhere.

Motherboard Comparison Chart

Test Setup

Performance

We pushed each of these boards through our test suite just to make sure there weren’t any hidden performance issues. We also 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 an idea of the board’s business application performance, and to cover 3D graphics performance we ran Quake 3 Arena, Shogo, and Descent 3. Each of the game titles was run at 640x480x16 since we are trying to extrapolate motherboard performance not video board performance. We do not want to introduce the possibility of the video board becoming the bottleneck. Otherwise using a higher resolution would cause each of the motherboards to achieve almost identical scores.

Business Application Performance — Windows 98SE

The BCM board performs quite respectfully using BAPCO’s SYSmark98 under Windows 98 almost matching the performance of AMD’s fastest Fester board. However, all boards are scoring pretty much the same here, the difference between the lowest and the highest results is some meager 3.7%.

Business Application Performance — Windows NT

SYSmark98 under NT is a bit of a different story. Although the performance of the BCM board is in the middle of the pack it is 12 points behind the ASUS K7M. The ‘performance-spread’ is some 4.2% in this benchmark, still not too much to go by.

3D Gaming Performance — Shogo

The BCM provides the best frame-rate next to AMD’s optimized Fester board.

3D Gaming Performance — Descent 3

The BCM board takes 3rd position. Looks like all of these boards BIOSs could still use some more optimizations if you look how far ahead AMD’s Fester board is!

3D Gaming Performance — Quake 3 Arena

The ASUS K7M is still the fastest in Quake 3 Arena! I hope someday these motherboard manufacturers will contact AMD and figure out how to squeeze some more performance out of their products. AMD’s Fester board holds a clear lead by over 2 FPS.

Summary

Although the BCM board doesn’t provide any fancy or innovated features, there is definitely a place for it. As far as performance goes, QS750 is among the best under Windows 98. Although the board isn’t the worst performing board under NT it, like most of the others it could use some more BIOS tweaking. The one unique feature this board offers is its 3 ISA slots. In the batch of boards tested so far in our lab this one is the only product to have more than two ISA slots. The only issue with the BCM QS750 right now is it’s current BIOS. Currently the BCM board doesn’t function with AMD’s 700 or 750MHz product. I feel that BCM should at least mention this major issue on their web page. At minimum a statement saying they have resolved the issue and a new BIOS should be put online soon.

If they are going to claim 500-750MHz support than I believe the board should actually do it. I am really not fond of manufacturers claiming support for something that they haven’t fully tested! BCM does assure me that they will soon release a new BIOS that corrects this problem. I’d also like to repeat that if you are interested in an overclockable solution, you have to steer clear from the BCM QS750.

It is nice to see the growing acceptance of AMD’s Athlon. However, I hope that future boards will be designed with a little more creativity. Most of the boards we’ve tested in our lab look more like an AMD reference design. How about some over-clocking support (preferably in the BIOS), an ARM slot, onboard audio, or integrated SCSI?

If I were to pick a motherboard out of all the Athlon platforms we tested so far, it would still be the ASUS K7M. It is the only board that I’ve seen that offers descent overclockability (I’m always fond of more speed :). However I REALLY HATE the fact that ASUS plays possum by not promoting or even admitting that they even offer an Athlon platform. If you are not in to overclocking, any of these boards could fit the bill.

It does put a smile on my face to see BCM join BIOSTAR and FIC in their bold Athlon support. I’m starting to wonder if the time will ever come when the rest of the motherboard manufacturers will also pound their chests and demonstrate their Athlon support as well.