i815 B-Step Tualatin Motherboard Roundup - July 2001

Final Words

The Socket-370 platform has been around for a couple of years now, and the i815 chipset served us well for just over a year.  It isn’t surprising that these four motherboards based on a new variant of a Socket-370/i815 platform are indeed very mature; we’d expect similar results out of other Universal Motherboard platforms as there is no excuse to screw one of these designs up.

The stability of all four of the motherboards we compared here today was overall very good.  It was difficult to distinguish one motherboard from another in terms of stability (even harder than it was to differentiate them according to performance).

Out of the four, the Soyo SY-TISU was clearly the most overclocking/tweaking friendly.  The ASUS was more stable at overclocked speeds however; it’s a shame that the board has no voltage adjustment.

The Intel D815EEA2 actually puts the capabilities of the chipset to use, offering four on-board USB ports, an on-board Ethernet port and of course AC’97 audio.  It looks like it’ll take the nForce to finally bring integrated Ethernet to the eyes of Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers. 

As far as the Tyan Tomcat i815T goes, the potential for it to be a entry-level server solution is there but in the form it was provided to us it’s nothing more than a plain i815 motherboard.