Motherboard Head to Head: Epox MVP3G2 vs Tyan S1598

Performance/Stability - Advantage Tyan

Here's the first point on Tyan's side of the court.  With over 8 years of experience in manufacturing some of the highest quality workstation/server motherboards for the x86 platform, it is safe to say that Tyan knows a little bit about producing a stable motherboard solution.  The S1598 is one of the most stable Super7 motherboards we have looked at to date, and although it still pales in comparison to the stability of Tyan's high end server motherboards it is definitely more than enough for your average user.  The stability of the G2 was not horrible at all, in fact it takes a very close backseat to the S1598 and for average usage patterns the stability differences between the two are almost non-existent.  

The performance argument is an entirely different one, according to Epox, slower memory timings and other such stability oriented optimizations keep the G2 from rising to meet the level of performance the S1598 offers right out of the box.  Whether this is the case or not is up to Epox to explain, however the bottom line is that the S1598 is clearly the faster board out of the two and although we normally don't like to judge motherboards based on performance, there is a clear line of difference between the performance of the G2 and the S1598. 

Added Features - Draw

While the Epox MVP3G2 stops at giving the user what they asked for, the Tyan S1598 goes above and beyond the call of duty to offer a unique feature that Epox didn't take into account.  While both boards feature the standard Wake On LAN connectors and other such features that have since been made a part of the basic motherboard configuration, the S1598 adds support for a dual color ACPI LED which is another step closer towards what a truly PC'99 compliant motherboard will most likely offer as features in the next few months.

This feature is balanced out by Epox's support for a keyboard hot key that can power up the system courtesy of the ATX specification.  While both of these features aren't the most commonly desired features, they are definitely appreciated as long as they don't increase the final cost to the consumer by a noticeable degree ;)