i820 Motherboard Roundup - January 2000

Conclusion

If you’re in the market for an i820 motherboard, AOpen is the way to go.  The AX6C and AX6C-L are both very stable and very reliable contenders for the best i820 motherboard, and just as the AX6B was to the BX motherboard market, expect these motherboards to remain on top in terms of reliability and stability in the long run. 

The ability to manually select the RDRAM clock multiplier is a very useful feature, especially when overclocking, and it was a very good idea for AOpen to include that feature within the BIOS setup of both boards. 

Therefore, our pick for Editor’s Choice for the best i820 motherboard with RDRAM support out of this group goes to AOpen for the AX6C and AX6C-L. 

The first runner up goes to ASUS for the P3C-2000, whose stability and feature set is just about on-par with that of AOpen, the only major downside being that with its SDRAM support comes sub-BX levels of performance.  If you’re willing to make that sacrifice in order to have an i820 based motherboard, then the P3C-2000 is a very good option. 

The flexible overclocking options of the P3C-2000 as well as SDRAM support make it a very appetizing option; if it weren’t for the performance hit associated with the MTH, it would be the perfect motherboard with 133MHz FSB support. 

We will be regularly updating our i820 motherboard roundup as we receive more motherboards based on the chipset, and expect to see roundups of Apollo Pro 133A, KX133/AMD750, and dual processor motherboards in the near future.