100MHz Bus Speed & Socket-7 Motherboards

Normally when testing a motherboard I run the test system through a few passes of Winstone 97 and Winstone 98, however while using the 100MHz bus speed on the Tyan Titan Turbo ATX-2 most tests failed, Windows 95's registry would either become corrupt during the testing process or the system would hang.  Therefore I had to become a bit more creative with the tests, meaning I ran the portions of Winstone which would run (none of Winstone 98 would complete) and compared those scores.  The test system ran without the Intel Bus Master IDE Drivers installed, the system seemed to be a bit more stable with the Microsoft DMA Drivers instead of Intel's BMIDE Drivers. 

Here are the exact specifications on how I tested:

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 97 / Business Graphics Winmark 97 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

• After each motherboard was tested a complete format of the test hard drive was initiated and the OS/benchmarking software was re-installed afterwards a defragment was initiated using Windows 95's Disk Defragmentation Utility

• 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 800 x 600 x 256 colors

Test Configuration

The Results

Here they are:

Test System 1 ran using the AMD K6/233 at 100MHz x 2.0

Test System 2 ran using the AMD K6/233 at 66MHz x 3.0