This motherboard was also tested both as an entry-level and a high-end board because of its support for both onboard and external graphics. As it is based on the Intel 815E chipset, it has onboard audio and video as well as support for an external AGP card. Again, as in the case of the Jetway J 618AF, it scored well on the features when put in the entry-level category, but lost out when placed in the high-end category. A notable feature is its six PCI slots, the highest number in any of the boards that we reviewed. So you will never have a dearth of slots for add-on cards. Interestingly, the driver CD that was given to us caused the machine to hang repeatedly and we had to use alternate drivers for the motherboard. Later it was clarified that this was because the board came to us directly from the production line and the driver CDs were in beta stage. The motherboard comes bundled with PC-Cillin antivirus.

Let’s see how the board fared on our test bench. Setting it up as an entry-level configuration, we ran our benchmarks on the board. The result for Business Winstone 99 that measures performance in normal day-to-day productivity applications was well at the top. In fact, the scores for this test do not vary much given today’s fast machines. The board performed about average in 3D Mark 2000 and VideoMark 2000, the graphics benchmarks. At an average fps of 17.65 in Quake III Arena and average CPU usage of 5.9 percent, the board was one of the better performers in games and audio tests.

With a high-end configuration with an external AGP card, the motherboard could not do well with its total score being on the lower end of the group. Though it did fine in High-end Winstone and VideoMark 2000, it could not give good frame rates in the Indy 3D application benchmark. For 3D Winbench 2000, the benchmark for high-end 3D graphic applications, the score was again not very good, in fact it scored the lowest in the category. In Ejay MP3 tests, the board took the second longest time to encode our test WAV file, which is not very good.

A price of Rs 5,500 gets you the board with a year’s warranty. It is fair for an entry-level machine but not good enough for a high-end configuration.