May 1999 Slot-1 BX Motherboard Roundup

The BIOS setup of a motherboard is an often overlooked feature, however it is a very important one that must be taken into account. The BIOS setup, whether made by Award, AMI, or Phoenix, contains a few key options that can determine whether or not your experience will be a pleasant one, especially down the road when you start adding in more peripherals.

The ability to individually assign IRQs to PCI slots is a priceless feature that many motherboard manufacturers refrain from supporting, simply because it?s a feature that quite a few users overlook. The ability to assign IRQs to individual PCI slots can be a tremendous aid in solving IRQ conflicts where your "wonderful" OS doesn?t seem to be of much help. A new feature you'll want to look into is the ability to enable/disable Intel's new Processor Identification number, however this feature should quickly appear in virtually all BIOS setup utilities as it is nothing more than a BIOS modification

The ability to enable/disable IRQs for devices such as the PS/2 mouse port, PCI VGA adapters, USB adapters, and any on-board peripherals seems like a feature that should naturally be included in any BIOS setup, unfortunately that is not always the case. While most newer motherboards come with up-to-date BIOSes that do allow for this sort of configuration, the cheaper boards out there don?t always offer the same. Did someone say you get what you pay for?

For a single processor BX board, there is no excuse for a manufacturer not to include a jumperless CPU setup. Although the number of jumperless motherboards has increased dramatically in the past few months, the total is still quite low. Inspired by a thriving success on ABIT?s part, most motherboard manufacturers are pursuing jumperless or pseudo-jumperless designs to make their boards even easier to use. While a jumperless design is preferred, it?s not required, the big question is why haven?t more motherboard manufacturers pursued a manual CPU voltage adjustment utility ala-ABIT.

Currently there are only two motherboards that allow for the adjustment of the core voltage of the Pentium II/III/Celeron CPUs, ABIT?s BX6/BH6/BX6 Revision 2, and the new Microstar MSI 6163. Although there have been rumors that AOpen?s newest revision of the AX6BC does allow for manual voltage configuration, these AX6BC boards don?t seem to be readily available to the masses just yet, so you may want to hold off on that decision for now. The MSI 6163 has been sitting in AnandTech?s labs for quite a while now, unfortunately the sample doesn?t seem to be stable enough to complete a full run through Winstone, and therefore the board cannot be evaluated. AnandTech will be working with MSI in the future to find out the cause of the stability problems (hopefully they are just isolated to this sample) and attempt to resolve them, at which point this comparison will be updated.