Considerations
We already reviewed three different motherboards
from azza; the third one is coming next week in our exclusive Via133a round
up. From our current experience with Azza products, we took notes on some
things we found important and think that they should be highly considered
by their engineers. First, I would like to point out the somehow minimal expansion
Azza uses on their boards. Most of their motherboards come with four PCI slots.
We must say that these days 4PCI slots is considered the very minimum, especially
for an i815 solution that can easily host up to six slots. We would highly
recommend they replace their motherboards featuring the AMR slots with an
optional PCI slot, or rework the PCB to add a fifth PCI slot without having
to eliminate the AMR slot.
Secondly, maybe not the most important but definitely
worth mentioning, is their weak voltage regulations. I do realize that not
all motherboard makers support and encourage overclocking, but these days
the word overclocking has become something internal to the computer user.
We would highly encourage AZZA improve their voltage regulations. Maybe they
could include multiple voltage raises and make them all controllable via the
BIOS. These little features would be definitely appreciated by the end users.
The test system
What I have decided to do is use a 550E Pentium III Processor for the complete
benchmarking suite. I’ve used the 550E at 100MHz and then at 133MHz to keep
track of it’s overclocking stability and performance. We used a Matrox G400
32Mb video card with the most recent BETA
6.00.010 drivers; In order to achieve the full
performance, we used a clean windows 98SE install for each motherboard. 
