Epox P2-112A Apollo Pro Pentium II Board

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.

How I Tested

• Each benchmark was run a minimum of 2 times and a maximum of 5 times, if the motherboard failed to complete a single test within the 5 allocated test runs the OS/Software was re-installed on a freshly formatted Hard Drive and the BIOS settings were adjusted to prevent the test from failing again.  All such encounters were noted at the exact time of their occurrence.

• Business Winstone 98 & 3D Winbench 98 was run at each individually tested clock speed, if reliable scores were achieved with the first two test runs of the suite an average of the two was taken and recorded as the final score at that clock speed.  If the test system displayed erratic behavior while the tests were running or the results were incredibly low/high the tests were re-run up to 5 times and an average of all the test runs was taken and recorded at the final score at that clock speed

• All video tests were conducted using an AGP video accelerator

• No foreign drivers were present in the test system other than those required for the system to function to the best of its ability

• All foreign installation files were moved to a separate partition during the test as to prevent them from effecting the test results

• All tests were conducted at 1024 x 768 x 16-bit color

• 3D Winbench 98 tests were double buffered and conducted at 800 x 600 x 16-bit color

The Final Decision

If you don't need to have the incredible overclocking capabilities of the ABIT BH6, and want to try something new, a little different, and definitely more cost effective than most Pentium II motherboards, the Apollo Pro based P2-112A from Epox will make an outstanding foundation for virtually any system.  The cost to manufacture the VIA Apollo Pro chipset and the option of re-using older DIMMs on the P2-112A make this board much more cost effective than one could've ever imagined a Pentium II board could possibly be, especially if you navigate down the road of the Celeron or Celeron A.  Just make sure you don't rely too heavily on 3D application performance, as the AGP performance on the Apollo Pro chipset isn't up to par with that of the Intel 440BX chipset...curious as to why?  Search the AnandTech Mainboard Reviews for a special comparison between the 440BX and the Apollo Pro in the very near future...