On 20 May 98 at 5:39, Ron Bain wrote:

> I have a 486 and want to upgrade by transferring my present hardware to
> a bare bones system that I plan to put together.
>
> I have narrowed my search to 3 motherboards to be used with a AMD K6
> listed in the order of preference:
>     1.  Abit TX5 (because of Tom's Hardware Guide recommendation) at
> $139;
>     2.  ASUS TX97-VV (because of on board sound and video) at $239;
>     3.  Iwill P55xb2 (becasuse of a PC Club recommendation) at $119.
>
> Any thoughts or suggestions (and warnings).

  Abit and Asus both make excellent boards.
  I can't seem to find a "-VV" version of the Asus board, so it's
hard to tell whether this is worth the extra $100.

  All three of these boards are built around the Intel 430TX chipset,
which supports SDRAM memory and UDMA drives.  But none of these
boards has an AGP video slot, and this chipset will cache only the
first 64MB of installed RAM.

  My feeling is that a TX-based system that you build today is going
to be near the edges of its expansion/upgrade envelope.  If you're
only now getting around to moving up from 486, maybe that's not so
important, but if you're looking to future expansion/upgrade, you
should either go to PII (Intel's recommendation...) or look at boards
using a non-Intel chipset such as Via's VP3.  This will extend the
cachable region to 512MB, may include an AGP slot, and may support
the 100MHz system bus which new "K6-II"s will be able to use by
year-end.

David G