on 21. July 1998 21:10 Chuck Hassenplug


<snip>
>    I am looking for a motherboard and am
>willing to spend $100-$150.  I'm not
>using a Pentium II and probably don't need
>AGP, but it couldn't hurt to have
<snip>


Basically you have the choice between two
chipsets the ALI Aladin V and the VIA
Apollo MVP3 (or ETEQ). Some might say
"What about SiS?", but that's not really a 100
MHz chipset.I would go for the VIA chipset
as you can run it asynchronously
(CPU at 100 /memory at 66 MHz) and you
can have up to 2 MB of second level cache
and of course up to 512 MB cacheable area
(I haven't seen one, but its in the specs) all
non Intel 100 MHz boards that I have
test results for have problems with the AGP
support so you're going to be web surfing
for updates if you do decide to get a AGP card.
based on the results I have for 15 100MHz
Super Socket 7 boards I would suggest the
EPOX EP51 MVP3E-M with 1 MB of cache
and 256 KB of cacheable area or the NMC
5V-MMX which is the same board (With
NMC you have to be careful, you never know
which company is making their boards at
the minute) On the negative side is:

Problems with the i740 graphic chip
(No picture,
should be fixed with the next bios update)

Problems with the soft-on/off switch
(HD starts running again and is then cut off,
not healthy in the long run.)

Cheap (low quality) DIMM sockets.

My personal opinion is to wait another 3
months till the problems have been ironed
out of all of these boards.

If you want the test results e-mail me and I'll
scan them in and send it to you.

hope this helps
Rick Swartz