October '97 Slot-1 Motherboard Comparison

At the base 300MHz clock speed Chaintech is the clear leader with a score of 67.5, followed by AOpen's AX6L by a differential margin of 0.6 points...hardly noticeable to the average user.  Coming in a close third place is ASUS' P2L97, an excellent performer which is pretty much expected considering ASUS' history of producing high speed high quality motherboards.  The Pentium II board that managed to come in fourth place in this roundup, amazingly enough wasn't a 440LX based motherboard...rather a board based on the old 440FX (Natoma) chipset.  This board is none other than Megatrends FX83-A, unfortunately the original revision of the FX83-A is no longer in production it has been replaced by the FX83-II which has been problematic to quite a few users.  Its a shame, the FX83-A had something most of the older 440FX P2 boards released didn't have, the potential to become something great.  Moving down the list to the 5th place holder, FIC's KL-6011 managed to pull out a 66.2 Business Winstone score, mind you that all the listings on this chart are ALL outstanding performers and they disserve equal consideration, remember to look at more than the numbers you see before you, look at the individual features of each motherboard and then make the final decision.  It is very interesting to note that some of the older 440FX boards like the ASUS KN97-X outperform even the newest LX based motherboards, this just goes to show you that nothing can beat a well designed motherboard...not even a bloated new chipset ;)