ABIT LX6 LX Pentium II Board

The Test

In recent times, choosing a motherboard cannot be completely determined by a Winstone score. Now, many boards come within one Winstone point of each other and therefore the need to benchmark boards against each other falls. Therefore you shouldn't base your decision entirely on the benchmarks you see here, but also on the technical features and advantages of this particular board, seeing as that will probably make the greatest difference in your overall experience.

Test Configuration

In spite of the 100MHz bus speed setting the LX6 can still be beat by the AOpen AX6L, its biggest competitor. However, do not take the Winstone scores into consideration exclusively. Have a look at the LX6's performance in the individual categories of memory, disk, and video performance.

Here the performance of the LX6 is beginning to seem more and more worthwhile. The Uncached Performance of the test drive under Wintune 97 was an incredible score as well as the RAM benchmarks. How much of an increase in performance does the 100MHz bus speed give you over the 66MHz bus speed in a real world test? To find out let's fire up Quake =)

Using the fluctuation in the actual bus speed put into operation when the 100MHz setting is activated on the LX6 to my advantage I managed to get the Pentium II as close to a real 300MHz as possible with the 100MHz setting. However since the 83.3MHz x 3.5 setting results in a clock speed of about 291MHz and to illustrate the raw performance increase of the 100MHz bus over the 66MHz standard the Pentium II, when using the 100MHz setting, was clocked at approximately 275MHz which is as close as I could get it to the 291MHz of the 83.3 x 3.5 test run without going over by too much. The Quake tests prove that the 100MHz bus speed, when applied to the Pentium II processor, provides a maximum of a 16% increase in video performance with a realistic increase around 5 - 11%. One must realize that the reason for such a low increase in performance is because the L2 cache of the Pentium II runs at 1/2 the processor's clock speed and therefore has nothing to do with the actual bus speed of the CPU if the resulting clock speed is still the same. For example, the 66.6MHz x 4.5 setting results in a clock speed of about 300MHz, as does the 75MHz x 4.0 setting. The L2 cache in both situations operates at 1/2 clock speed, with 1/2 * 300MHz being 150MHz. Therefore by increasing the bus speed from 66MHz to 75MHz you see very little improvement in speed. The distance between the 83.3MHz setting and the 91.6MHz bus frequency achieved with the LX6 is almost non-existent as shown by the Quake and S/VGA Bench tests. The most dramatic performance increase when using the 100MHz setting over the 83.3MHz setting is the 4% increase in your Quake frame rate at 640 x 480. Is the 100MHz bus speed setting worth it? Yes, however don't expect it to absolutely knock your socks off...we've waited so long for it to appear, and now that we have it we're beginning to realize that it isn't all that it was cracked up to be. It seems like we'll have to do a little more waiting before we can truly see the positive effects of the 100MHz bus speed.

The Final Decision

The LX6 right now is probably your best bet for a fast, stable, and reliable LX based Pentium II board. Its combination of expandability features, performance, and overall quality including its unique support for the 100MHz bus speed make the LX6 is sure fire winner. Who will dethrone ABIT? We can't say for sure now, however whoever it is will have to have one he!! of a motherboard to beat this. Especially considering the fact that the LX6 can be picked up for under $200! ABIT's challenge to the motherboard world? Name a motherboard that is fast, stable, and affordable. I like to call it an ABIT.