Chaintech 5SDA

In recent times, choosing a motherboard cannot be completely determined by a Winstone score. Now, many boards come within one Winstone point of each other and therefore the need to benchmark boards against each other falls. Therefore you shouldn't base your decision entirely on the benchmarks you see here, but also on the technical features and advantages of this particular board, seeing as that will probably make the greatest difference in your overall experience.

How I Tested

• Each benchmark was run a minimum of 2 times and a maximum of 5 times, if the motherboard failed to complete a single test within the 5 allocated test runs the OS/Software was re-installed on a freshly formatted Hard Drive and the BIOS settings were adjusted to prevent the test from failing again.  All such encounters were noted at the exact time of their occurrence.

• Business Winstone 97 / Business Graphics Winmark 97 was run at each individually tested clock speed, if reliable scores were achieved with the first two test runs of the suite an average of the two was taken and recorded as the final score at that clock speed.  If the test system displayed erratic behavior while the tests were running or the results were incredibly low/high the tests were re-run up to 5 times and an average of all the test runs was taken and recorded at the final score at that clock speed

• Business Winstone 98 / Business Graphics Winmark 98 was run on the Pentium MMX at 233MHz, and the AMD K6 at 233MHz, the averaging rules for these tests are the same as those used for the 97 test suites. 

• Chris Dial's VGA Bench & SVGA Bench were run in cases where 3D performance of a video accelerator/onboard video was tested.   Both benchmarks were run a total of 3 times on either an AMD K6 or Intel Pentium MMX clocked at 233MHz (66.6 bus x 3.5)

• Quake was run in cases where gaming performance of a video accelerator/onboard video was tested.  DOS Quake was run with the screen size set to maximum during which 'TIMEDEMO DEMO2' was run (Hit '~' then type TIMEDEMO DEMO2) and the frame rate recorded.

• After each motherboard was tested a complete format of the test hard drive was initiated and the OS/benchmarking software was re-installed afterwards a defragment was initiated using Windows 95's Disk Defragmentation Utility

• No foreign drivers were present in the test system other than those required for the system to function to the best of its ability

• All foreign installation files were moved to a separate partition during the test as to prevent them from effecting the test results

• All tests were conducted at 800 x 600 x 256 colors

Test Configuration

The Final Decision

Interested in an alternative to the cheap $1000 PC's based on Cyrix's Media GX processor you see floating around your local computer store?  Try custom building a system based on the Chaintech 5SDA, you won't sacrifice the performance of the processor you're looking for, whether it be AMD's K6, Intel's Pentium MMX or Cyrix's 6x86MX, for the price of your system.