Chipset: SiS 530 Price: Rs 3,510 Software: Mandrake Linux, Virtual Drive, StarOffice 5.2 Website: www.azza.com.tw |
This was the other Socket 7 board besides the Tomato T530BS. Based on the SiS
530 chipset, this motherboard can take older Pentium (up to 233 MHz), Cyrix or
AMD K6-2 processors. It has four PCI and two ISA slots and doesn’t have any
AGP slot. Display is onboard, and power connectors are available for both AT and
ATX power supplies. It also has a header for two USB ports. The keyboard
connector is a DIN type and one PS/2 port is provided for the mouse. Software
bundled with the board is good, though, and consists of Mandrake Linux, Star
Office 5.2, and Virtual Drive.
The board supports a maximum CPU speed of 450 MHz, so you’ll have to
under-clock if you get an AMD K6-2 500 MHz processor. The benchmark scores were
much better compared to the Tomato board, perhaps due to the external cache on
the motherboard. It scored 22 Winmarks in Business Winstone, which is pretty
good, and scores for other benchmarks were also pretty good. In fact, they were
comparable to some of the boards in the entry-level category of the shootout. In
3Dmark 2000 and VideoMark 2000, it got 781 and 1,062 respectively. In Quake III
Arena, it got an average frame rate of 17.4 fps.
For Audio Winbench, the CPU utilization was around 6.4 percent, which is
again a good performance.
It’s priced at Rs 3,510 with a two-year warranty. You might think of buying
it once, but for about Rs 500 more, you could get one of the latest entry-level
boards in the market