ABIT AX5

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

Windows 95 Performance of the ABIT AX5

I reran all of the ABIT AX5 tests with some 50ns Micron Turbo EDO to get reliable scores at the 83MHz bus speed setting since I was one of the unlucky few to test the Revision 2.2 AX5 instead of the Revision 2.21 or 2.22 which don't feature the 'wonderful' SDRAM compatibility problems I experienced. In order to even the playing field I used a wonderful utility known as TweakBIOS which allowed me to really max out my memory timings with the EDO, using that utility I got the performance decrease when using EDO instead of SDRAM down to an amazing 0.4 Winstone points at most!!! The scores are truly amazing, looks like the Shuttle HOT-569 finally has some competition for that best Socket-7 motherboard based on the Intel TX chipset award...

The Final Decision

Should you buy this board? YES!!! I am very impressed with the improvements ABIT has made since the original revision of this board, and ABIT continues to amaze me with the improvements they can make to an already near-perfect design. The AX5 features speed, reliability, and compatibility that all power users disserve, as well as that wonderful SoftMenu CPU Setup and the world famous "ABIT Manual" that cannot be rivaled by any other piece of documentation I have seen.