October '97 Socket-7 Motherboard Comparison

Motherboard Business Winstone 97 ABIT AX5 2.2 57.0 ABIT IT5H 1.5 Not Run ABIT IT5H 2.0 54.8 ABIT PD5N 55.0 ABIT PX5 56.1 ABIT TX5 55.5 ABIT TX5N 55.7 AOpen AP58 55.2 AOpen AX5T-2 Not Run AOpen AX5T-3.1 56.0 ASUS TXP4-X 55.6 Chaintech 5SDA 55.9 Chaintech 5SIM 54.4 Chaintech 5TTL 57.0 Chaintech 5TTM Not Run Chaintech 5TTM1 56.9 Chaintech 5TDM2 56.9 DFI P5XV3 56.6 DFI P5XV3 (AGP) 57.0 EPoX P55-VP3 54.9 FIC PA-2007 56.4 FIC PA-2010+ 48.6 FIC PA-2011 56.1 FIC PA-2012 56.1 FIC PA-2012 (AGP) 56.3 FIC PT-2007 56.9 Megatrends HX83 Not Run MTech MIG R539 Not Run MTech MIG R540 52.0 MTech MIG R541 52.0 MTech Mustang R534F 57.6 QDI Titanium 1B 55.4 Shuttle HOT-565 55.8 Shuttle HOT-567 55.0 Shuttle HOT-569 56.3 Shuttle HOT-571 55.0 Shuttle HOT-603 56.6 Supermicro P5MMA Not Run Supermicro P5MMS98 56.1 Tyan Titan Turbo S1573S Failed

At 166MHz, the MTech Mustang regains its lead over the DFI P5XV3 (AGP) by a virtually un-noticeable 0.6 point difference.  Most motherboards here perform pretty much equally, the only real difference in speed is noticed when you get down to the lower 5 motherboards on the chart.  There difference between the 9th place Shuttle HOT-603 and the 1st place MTech Mustang is only 1 Winstone point, not much at all. 

For the most part the breakdown of this chart is the same as the comparison at 150MHz, with one major exception, at 166MHz (using the 66MHz bus speed) the TX based motherboards seem to be doing much better than the non-Intel based motherboards.  It makes sense that since Intel officially supports the 66MHz bus speed (and nothing higher as of now) they would make sure that their chipsets would perform to the best of their ability at that bus speed.  The AOpen AP58's SiS 5582 chipset from above does officially support the 75MHz bus speed, which could explain its excellent performance when using it since the motherboard was designed with that in mind.   

With a Cyrix 6x86MX the bottom line is this, if you want the best possible performance you will want to pursue a motherboard using a non-Intel chipset, preferably one that supports the 6x86MX's unique Linear Burst Mode capability which boosts performance approximately 1 - 3% in real world applications.   A motherboard with a decent voltage regulator (preferably a switching voltage regulator system) is also a plus because you eliminate some chances of instability due to large variations in the voltage supplied to your CPU.