This was the other Socket 7 board besides the Tomato T530BS. Based on the SiS 530 chipset, this motherboard can take older Pentium (up to 233 MHz), Cyrix or AMD K6-2 processors. It has four PCI and two ISA slots and doesn’t have any AGP slot. Display is onboard, and power connectors are available for both AT and ATX power supplies. It also has a header for two USB ports. The keyboard connector is a DIN type and one PS/2 port is provided for the mouse. Software bundled with the board is good, though, and consists of Mandrake Linux, Star Office 5.2, and Virtual Drive.

The board supports a maximum CPU speed of 450 MHz, so you’ll have to under-clock if you get an AMD K6-2 500 MHz processor. The benchmark scores were much better compared to the Tomato board, perhaps due to the external cache on the motherboard. It scored 22 Winmarks in Business Winstone, which is pretty good, and scores for other benchmarks were also pretty good. In fact, they were comparable to some of the boards in the entry-level category of the shootout. In 3Dmark 2000 and VideoMark 2000, it got 781 and 1,062 respectively. In Quake III Arena, it got an average frame rate of 17.4 fps.

For Audio Winbench, the CPU utilization was around 6.4 percent, which is again a good performance.

It’s priced at Rs 3,510 with a two-year warranty. You might think of buying it once, but for about Rs 500 more, you could get one of the latest entry-level boards in the market