October '97 Socket-7 Motherboard Comparison

winner of the Best TX Based Motherboard award on this site, the Shuttle HOT-569 still rules as the 1st place winner at 208MHz with the Pentium MMX followed by the ABIT AX5 and then the Megatrends HX83.   As history has shown us however, the best performing motherboard on paper isn't necessarily the best motherboard.  At higher bus speeds, particularly 83MHz many motherboards either fail or require a more generous tweaking of the BIOS timings, therefore effectively degrading the overall performance rating of the motherboard.   While a motherboard may be the fastest at an un-overclocked setting, pushing it to the limits can cause it to choke miserably.  In cases like this you have to consider the quality of the motherboard (capacitors, design, PCB, etc...) in addition to any known incompatibilities, particularly with SDRAM.

At 225MHz the ABIT PX5 still holds the lead, however it is being threatened by a newcomer to the page, the QDI Titanium 1B.  A jumperless motherboard, arguably one of the first jumperless TX motherboards to hit the market, QDI has always been a competitor of ABIT, however they haven't been receiving the credit they disserve.  Here you can clearly see that the overclocked performance of the Titanium 1B is well beyond entry level, this is mainly because the Titanium 1B worked flawlessly at the 75MHz setting, the BIOS memory timings were set at the fastest possible settings without any problems what-so-ever.  Although it wasn't the fastest performer with the AMD K6 or the Cyrix 6x86MX, the QDI Titanium 1B is a very well designed motherboard which is also a very decent performer.  For these reasons, in addition to the extremely low failure rate, most smaller vendors choose to carry QDI motherboards instead of other more popular ABIT or FIC products.