This motherboard from Azza is based on one of VIA’s older chipsets—the VIA 693a. The board has a Socket 370 interface, which can take in PIII or Celeron processors in the FC-PGA packaging. It supports an FSB of 66 to 133 MHz, so you can select the one you want according to the processor. All settings other than the FSB can be done from the BIOS screen. The board has three DIMMs with a combined capacity of 1.5 GB of RAM, and five PCI, and an ISA slot. The AGP slot on the board, which is used for your graphics card supports only 2x AGP so it lost points here. Most other boards in this group have support for 4x AGP. The board is laid out on an ATX form factor and all the ports are onboard and color-coded for easy identification.

Performance wise the board couldn’t make any impression against its competition. In high-end Winstone 99 it got a score of 41.9, which otherwise is respectable but was lowest in the group, with the highest being 51.7 for the Intel board. It was pretty much the same story in all the benchmarks. Overall in performance it managed a score of 78.9, higher only than the Mercury 693a FSX, which scored 78.5. The Mercury incidentally was also based on the VIA693a chipset.

The most favorable aspect of the board is its price. At Rs 3,700, many of us may probably be willing to sacrifice the additional performance provided by the other boards, some of which cost up to three times the 693 ATX.