Gainward 6IZB i440ZX microATX Socket-370

The Bad

Stability and performance is not exactly the 6IZB's cup of tea. During repeated Winstone 99 runs, the system would often crash, lockup, or otherwise fail to complete the tests. When it did make it through a complete run, performance was significantly below that of other boards - often less than half. "Often" less than half because the scores fluctuated greatly between runs, from about 7 to around 12 on AnandTech's Intel Celeron 366. For those that don't have Winstone 99 scores memorized (I don't! ;), a typical score for a Celeron 366 on an i440ZX chipset board is 18. Although unlikely due to the magnitude of fluctuation, this is possibly due to clock speed fluctuations that Winstone also complained about quite often. A clean install of Windows 98 and the same hardware used in other AnandTech test beds were used for testing. Testing was performed with and without the onboard sound enabled. With scores this low, it seems almost as if the cache is disabled, but Winstone and other programs that report cache showed 128KB, as expected for a Celeron A processor.

Quake scores were similarly horrible, mustering just 2.8 fps while similar boards achieve at least 15 fps in software mode and demo1.dm2. Again, scores fluctuated.

The onboard ESS Solo-1 PCI sound cannot be disabled via jumpers or BIOS. To make matters worse, it is always assigned the same IRQ as the AGP video card - another possible source for the low performance. On top of all that, it takes up two IRQ's - the one assigned by the BIOS to the PCI card and another for DOS Sound Blaster emulation. To top all that off, there's no way to disable the USB IRQ.

Thanks to limitations of the ZX chipset, only 2 DIMM slots are available and memory expansion could become an issue. Make sure you buy as much RAM as you can the first time - you'll only have one shot to upgrade without throwing away some old RAM.

Power management support is also lacking. ACPI is not supported at all, which is already quite useful under Windows 98 and will become even more important under Windows 2000. A BIOS update could fix the IRQ and ACPI problems, but none is available as of now for that purpose.

The manual is not very useful for the first time system builder with little information on how to install the actual board. It covers three different boards, but fortunately they only vary in the chipset used, so this is not a major compromise.

USB Compatibility

• Number of Front Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 0

• Number of Rear Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 2

• USB IRQ Enable/Disable in BIOS.: No

• USB Keyboard Support in BIOS.: Yes

Recommended SDRAM

Recommended SDRAM: Mushkin SEC -GH PC100 SDRAM; Memory Man SEC -GH PC100 SDRAM
SDRAM Tested: 1 x 64MB PC100 SDRAM

Manufacturer: The Memory Man
Purchase Web-Site: http://www.memory-man.com

Manufacturer: Mushkin
Purchase Website: http://www.mushkin.com