DFI CM33-EC

The CM33-EC is a Socket 370 motherboard based on VIA’s PLE 133 chipset, meant for office users. It can house a PIII, Celeron or a Cyrix III processor and can take in a maximum of 1GB SDRAM in its two DIMM slots, which is more than sufficient. Expansion is taken care of by three PCI slots, an ISA as well as an AMR slot. The ISA slot could come in handy if you have older ISA devices. Display and sound are both onboard. The other usual ports namely two USB, one parallel, one serial and two PS2s are also onboard and color-coded for easy identification. Overall, it is feature rich, and the only thing you might need to add is an Ethernet card for offices.

To check out the board’s performance we ran BW and CCW 2001 on it. We used a Celeron 600 MHz, 128 MB RAM and a Barracuda ATA III hard drive and Windows 98 SE as the OS. It scored 19.6 and 19.7 are sufficient for most office users.

The major attraction of this board is its price tag of just Rs 3,750.

Sachin Makhija