Value Dual Socket-370 Motherboard Roundup - August 2001

The Winners and Conclusion

A little over a year ago, VIA announced that the Apollo Pro133A chipset indeed supported SMP, and things have never been the same. Together with the drop in prices for CPUs and the developments in the operating system arena, dual processor systems are very affordable and quite useful for a lot of people now.

Among all these boards, we noticed two major target audiences, one towards IDE users and one towards SCSI users. For the boards that are targeted for IDE users, we found the Iwill DVD266-R to be the best option. It uses the Apollo Pro266 chipset and offers you almost everything you need. Its AMI IDE RAID controller supports the three most common RAID setups. The performance of the board is incredible, thanks in large part to the extra memory bandwidth offered by DDR SDRAM. Each board is also bundled with two Taisol HSF units for better CPU cooling, and overclocking on the board was very good as well. With the price of DDR SDRAM dropping, everyone should consider this board to be used in their dual processor system.

Since we weren't able to get our hands on the DVD266u-RN we can't really crown the board as the winner, but if the DVD266u-RN offers the same, or even better, stability, performance and overclocking, the DVD266u-RN is definitely a killer in the dual Socket-370 market.

On the SCSI side, we also have couple of boards from several big manufacturers as well. Unlike the IDE scenario, the three boards offering SCSI controllers compete very closely with each other. After careful comparison, we decided that the ASUS CUV4X-DLS comes out a bit ahead. It offers a great deal of overclocking and memory tweaking options, and its performance was reasonable as well. It features two 68-pin SCSI channels, and, most importantly, it has an integrated Ethernet controller.

On the other hand, the MSI 694D Master-S is a very nice board as well, offering the same level of stability and performance. If it also has an integrated Ethernet controller, without a doubt it would tie up with the ASUS CUV4X-DLS. The AOpen DX34 Plus is pretty decent as well, but its lack of overclocking ability and poor performance prevent it from being considered among the best.

So here's our value dual socket motherboards roundup. Dual processor is definitely making its way to the hardware community, and overall we are very impressed with the stability of the boards we tested here. We are honored to crown two AnandTech Editor's Choice awards, one to the Iwill DVD266-R as the king of IDE based motherboards, and the other to the ASUS CUV4X-DLS as the king of SCSI based boards.