Azza 693 ATX

This motherboard from Azza is based on one of VIA’s older chipsets–the

VIA 693a. The board has a Socket 370 interface, which can take in PIII or

Celeron processors in the FC-PGA packaging. It supports an FSB of 66 to 133 MHz,

so you can select the one you want according to the processor. All settings

other than the FSB can be done from the BIOS screen. The board has three DIMMs

with a combined capacity of 1.5 GB of RAM, and five PCI, and an ISA slot. The

AGP slot on the board, which is used for your graphics card supports only 2x AGP

so it lost points here. Most other boards in this group have support for 4x AGP.

The board is laid out on an ATX form factor and all the ports are onboard and

color-coded for easy identification.

Performance wise the board couldn’t make any impression against its

competition. In high-end Winstone 99 it got a score of 41.9, which otherwise is

respectable but was lowest in the group, with the highest being 51.7 for the

Intel board. It was pretty much the same story in all the benchmarks. Overall in

performance it managed a score of 78.9, higher only than the Mercury 693a FSX,

which scored 78.5. The Mercury incidentally was also based on the VIA693a

chipset.

The most favorable aspect of the board is its price. At Rs 3,700, many of us

may probably be willing to sacrifice the additional performance provided by the

other boards, some of which cost up to three times the 693 ATX.