Motherboards Grilled

The motherboard market has seen more than its fair share of action in the recent months. PCI Express replaced the age old AGP sometime back but it is only now that we are seeing it becoming mainstream and manufacturers literally flooding the market with products for both budget and enthusiast's alike.

It is indeed surprising though heartening to note that boards which cost as low as 5000 rupees support functions such as SATA, RAID and in a few cases even DDR II, which till now were available only for the high-end boards.

With this kind of a market scenario, we thought it was just the right time for us to do a high-end desktop motherboard shoot out to find out what are the various options available for the enthusiasts today.

What you should look for



Amongst the multitude of features that vendors will bombard you with, you will be surprised to find just how many of these are now coming as standard, we most certainly were.

We considered the following features while evaluating these boards.

The memory speed and type: There are broadly two RAM specifications prevalent today, DDR and it's newer iteration, DDR II. Now DDR has various frequencies so you should go for a board that supports DDR400 as this is one of the quicker 



versions. 

DDR II on the other hand currently runs at 533 MHz which may appear to be faster but due to the technology limitations (the RAS and CAS delays) it is as of now slower than DDR. However, in the future (say 6-9 months) as DDR II technology progresses, it will soon out pace DDR. Therefore, it makes sense to make your motherboard future proof to let you migrate to a faster platform tomorrow.

Graphics: Perhaps the single most important factor while choosing a power board is its graphics capabilities and performance. Nowadays SLI boards are all the rage and make more sense for a gamer than single graphics boards because even if at the time of buying a board you don't feel the need for two graphics cards, you will, in all probability, need this capability later when games become much more resource hungry than they are now.

PCI/PCI-E slots: Ever since PCI Express became the backbone of a motherboard, people have been talking about all peripherals (such as NICs, Modems, etc) moving to the PCI-E standard. This has so far not

materialised and probably won't as most of these features are now coming onboard. In fact, Creative's latest sound card, the X-Fi is based on PCI and not

PCI-E!

Onboard stuff: Here we looked at the various connectivity options that these boards provide, from the number of USB ports to Ethernet ports (whether Gigabit or 10/100) from FireWire to audio ports, everything was noted and marked.

Overclocking capabilities: Since these are enthusiast's boards, we would expect buyers to go over board with overclocking so we measured how friendly these boards were to that concept in terms of how much we could configure them. Traditionally, we have found that Intel boards are less overclockable as compared to AMD.

Component layout: This is perhaps one of the most under rated part of a motherboard but is more important than most other features. If you have a well laid out board, it will be able to take the overclocking stress a lot better. A well laid out board is one where the various components are spaced out, don't conflict with each other and you should be able to install a device in every single port. This is, however, an ideal situation and doesn't really happen. We checked how close did the boards come to this situation.

Special Features and Package Contents: Since these were high-end boards, they came with some really nice add-on 



features. Some of these included Bluetooth, WiFi, 7.1 channel audio, space saving cables, lockable SATA cables, dual Ethernet ports, dual BIOS, etc. We took all this into account as special features. Plus of course, we looked for other packaged content such as bundled s/w, drives, etc.

How we Tested



We set up two test beds, one each for Intel and AMD. The Intel test machine comprised of a 3.4 GHz P4 processor with 1 GB of DDR/DDR II memory depending on what the board supported. The disk drive used was a 120 GB 7200 RPM SATA drive from Maxtor. We used 256 MB MSI NVIDIA 6600 GT graphics cards.

The AMD machines were similarly set up except that the processor used here was the dual core AMD Athlon X2 4800+. We have not compared the Intel and AMD based boards because we didn't get an Intel Pentium D dual core. Also sadly, Intel did not send us any of their boards for the shootout.

We used the following tests.

Unreal Tournament 2004: This test benchmarks the Open GL capabilities but it is more stressful on the CPU subsystem of the motherboard which gets you differentiating scores between various chipsets and/or boards.

DOOM 3: Needs no explanation, based on DirectX and tests pretty much every last inch of performance in your 3D card, CPU and in short, the entire system. The most stressful game test out there today.

3D Mark 2005: It tests the motherboard's graphic subsystems to the fullest giving you a fair idea of the kind of graphics performance you can expect from the board. It also integrates CPU testing where it tests CPU subsystem to the extreme.

Multimedia Content Creation 2003 : This tests the board for its 3D rendering and encoding/decoding performance along with web authoring and in short tests the various bus systems for their performance in a multimedia studio like environment.

Video Encoding: This is a real world test where we timed using a stop watch, the time taken by each board to encode a 60 MB video file into

DIVX.

Unlike the Intel-based boards, where we saw a lot of boards coming in with Bluetooth, WiFi and such, the boards in the AMD segment had much less in terms of extra fanfare but were very solid performers.

Please note that we've not compared the Intel and AMD-based boards against each other. This is because the AMD boards were tested with an AMD X2 dual core CPU, while the Intel-based boards were tested with a regular single core P4 CPU. It would, therefore, have been an unfair comparison.

Also, you'll notice that there are no Intel-based motherboards in the shootout. Intel claimed to have shipped them to us, but they never reached us even while we were going to press. 

Winner selection



The Foxconn 915PL7AE-8S, MSI 915PL Neo-V and Foxconn 915GV7MH-S had a very high overall score only because of their ultra low price. These boards dont come with too many extra features hence we ignored their final scores while calculating the overall

winners.

Varun Dubey