motherboards

What is the use of a Ultra fast Processor if it is mated to a motherboards that crawls at a snail's pace? So the right combination of CPU and MB is required to optimize the performance of your system.

Naturally when Processors adhere to two architectures( Socket 7 & Slot 1) motherboards also come in two similar flavours. Those which can take socket 7 CPUs & those accepting P IIs.

Socket 7 is a 321 pin ZIF( Zero Insertion Force) socket that can take plain old Pentiums, MMXs, AMD K6s, K6-2s, Cyrix 6x86s & M-II. A socket 7 mainboard(MB) has the secondary(L2) cache on the mainboard only. This means that the L2 cache can run only at the speed of the MB. An usual socket7 MB can run at 60 or 66Mhz, with some boards supporting 75 & also 83Mhz unofficially. Yes, bus speeds lower than 60Mhz are also supported in some. The probability that all of them run reliably & stablely at 83Mhz or in some cases even at 75Mhz to be considered as a viable option is low. This is not to say that all are the same, & you will find some MBs which are much more stable than others, at the higher bus settings. What I want to imply is that if you are on the look out for a socket 7 MB with a plain vanilla Pentium, MMX..., installed, then the difference in performance between most of the boards at 66Mhz is not more than 2-5%. These mainboards can be based on any of the following main chipsets -

CHIPSET	MANUFACTURER	MAJOR FEATURES
430HX	Intel	ECC memory support, upto 256MB RAM cacheable, no UDMA support
430VX	Intel	No ECC support, no UDMA support, 64MB of cacheable RAM, scaled down version of 430HX
430TX	Intel	No ECC support, full UDMA supported, 64MB cacheable RAM size, final socket 7 chipset from Intel
Aladdin IV	Acer Labs inc( ALi)	No ECC support, UDMA support, 256MB RAM cacheable
VP3	VIA	No ECC support, (No?) UDMA support, 256Mb RAM cacheable

There is a new breed of socket 7 motherboards, called the Super 7 motherboards. These MBs support the 100Mhz bus speed officially. They are based on the Apollo MVP3 chipset from VIA and the Alladin V from ALi. They provide full AGP( Accelerated Graphics Port) support, UDMA and with 1MB L2 cache, they have a max. cacheable RAM size of 256MB.
All these features make these MBs an exciting prospect. But there are a few glitches which have to be( some have been) ironed out.

The Slot 1 platform was introduced by Intel in 1997, along with the Pentium II processors. This packaging has the advantage that the L2 cache runs at half the speed of the processor. The slot 1 chipsets on which these MBs are based are produced only by Intel. They are -

CHIPSET	FEATURES
440FX	This was the first PII chipset, adapted from the Pentium Pro. You may as well forget this as it is not being produced.
440LX	Modified from the 430TX(PIIX4). supports UDMA, USB, No ECC, 66Mhz FSB
440BX	Hottest MB in the market, 100Mhz FSB(Front side bus), dual processor support, UDMA, USB (233-450Mhz)
440EX	Scaled down version of the LX. Intended for Celeron CPUs.

In addition to these 440GX, 440NX chipsets are available. Since they are not intended for home use, I shall not deal with them here.
Recently VIA announced the introduction of a Slot 1 chipset. But it is too early to comment on it.

So which is best?
If you are intending to buy a socket 7 based system, a super 7 motherboard should be in your system. If you plan to buy a Pentium II PC, don't look below a 440BX chipset based MB.

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