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The
Leadtek WinFast 5300MA
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All-in-one
features at a stripped down price!
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| Leadtek
has been known for many years as a manufacturer of High End Graphics
Cards. They have until now, stayed within the Video/Grpahics space.
Like all healthy well established companies, occasionally it is time
to diversify. Enter the Leadtek WinFast 5300MA Motherboard. Leatek,
at this juncture, has teo motherboards available. The other board is
a dual Slot 1. We reviewed this Super 7 Socket based, multimedia
enhanced, all in one system board and were very impressed with the
feature set. |
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starters this board comes with on board AGP Graphics and also on
board 3D Sound! Here are the particulars... |
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- Supports
Intel Pentium P54C/P55C-MMX, AMD K5/ K6/ K6-2/ K6-3,Cyrix M1/M2
and Pentium Processors.
- AMD166to
300Mhz K6 &up to 400Mhz K6-2
- intel 166 to
200Mhz intel Pentium Processors and up to 233Mhz Pentium
processor with MMX technology.
- Cyrix 6X86MX
PR166+~PR233+ and up to 333Mhz M-II Processor
- Wide voltage
range to CPU Vcore: from 1.8~3.5V to 15A suitable for all future
CPU requirements
- Graphic SIS
530 chipset and Support PC 100 SDRAM
- Integrated
3D/2D VGA on Mainboard with 100MHz Bus speed
- Super 100MHz
VGA bus Supports up to 800 MB/s UMA VGA Memory, higher than
533MB/s AGP BUS
- Supports:
Sync. CPU clock/SDRAM(system clock) 66/75/83/95/100 MHz : Async.
CPU clock/SDRAM. Able to use 100MHz CPU and Low speed non-PC100
SDRAM .
- CPU/SDRAM
clock BIOS selectable
- Ultra DMA
33MB/Sec and Ultra DMA 66MB/Sec
- Power on by
keyboard , Modem ring on, Wake On Lan
- Supports
hardware monitor function.
- New BIOS
support ACPI and meets ACPI spec for Windows 98
- Year 2000
BIOS compliance and boot-up anti-virus support
- Audio on
board and meet PC98 require.
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| Let's
talk about the target audience for this board first. If you are a
cost conscious user on a limited budget, this board is in your
league. As the specs say, it has on board 2D/3D AGP video (no AGP
slot is available) and on board 3D enhanced audio. As a result you
won't need to lay out the cash for a sound card and 2D video card.
If you are in need of 3D gaming, you'll want to buy a PCI 3D card
and a Voodoo 2 paired up with this board makes for a superb low cost
gaming rig. Here's the kicker, this board will retail for around
$99! Yup, that's a Video Card, Sound Card and motherboard for the
price of just a low cost motherboard! We set our machine up as
follows. |
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Our
Test System
Mid
Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, AMDK6(2)-400 Overclocked to 475 MHz.,
Leadtek WinFast 5300MA, 64MB of PC100 CAS2 RAM, Maxtor 4320 17 GigD,
H Metabyte Wicked 3D Voodoo 2 PCI Video Card, On Board ESS 1938 Solo
1 Audio, on board SIS S700 AGP Graphics and Memorex 48X CDROM, Win98
and Direct X 6.1 installed
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| ***
One side note, this motherboard come equipped with the next
generation in EIDE Controller technology, UDMA66! Unfortunately we
haven't received our DMA66 capable drive yet (they are a rare breed
at this juncture) but we will post a follow up to this review when
there are hard drives available to support it. UDMA66 brings the
EIDE interface to 66MB/sec peak data rates! That is faster than Wide
SCSI and almost in the same league as Ultra 2 LVD SCSI which tops
out at 80MB/sec. *** |
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Overclocking
This board is
perfect for overclocking the K6(2). It has various available voltage
settings from the standard K6 2.2V up through 3.3V in .1 increments.
The bus speeds can be set up to 133 Mhz. with 95, 100, 105, 112, and
124 available in between. We were able to set our K6(2)-400 up to
475 MHz. at default voltage. We also were able to load Windows at
504 (4.5X112) but it locked after a few minutes of use. Something
tells me better cooling would have stabilized the CPU. We felt this
ability to overclock so well was a strong suit for the WinFast
5300MA.
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Benchmarks
WinTune
98
Offline
Test Results
| CPU |
(1)
AMD K6-2 with MultiMedia Extensions@476 MHz |
| Video
Board |
WinFast
5300 - S700 |
| Video
Mode |
1280x1024@16bits/pixel |
| RAM |
56
MB |
| OS |
Windows
98 4.10.1998 |
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Area
Tested
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Value
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| CPU
Integer |
1018.47
MIPS |
| CPU
Floating Point |
571.8572
MFLOPS |
| Video(2D) |
35.68584
MPixels/s |
| Direct3D |
47.46217
MPixels/s |
| OpenGL |
5.329742
MPixels/s |
| Memory |
713.6761
MB/s |
| Cached
Disk |
60.15886
MB/s |
| Uncached
Disk |
12.21642
MB/s |
Let's
point out a couple of things here. Notice the system memory number
of 56MB? Well, the on board graphics controller uses a shared memory
architecture. So you lose 8 meg. to your video processor if you set
it up that way in the BIOS. You can also set it back to 4MB or less
if you like. Get plenty of memory. It's cheap these days! Also, look
at the 2D video score. This test was done in 1280X1024 and 35+
Mpixels/second is a solid score at that resolution.
On
the subject of the video performance I would like to make two
comments...
1.
This board has on board graphics designed for the business not
gaming user. It will work VERY well for gaming IF you add a Voodoo 2
card to your system.
2.
The 2D desktop graphics visual quality of this board is absolutely
gorgeous! I have never seen such a crisp, clear and bright display
at high refresh rates at 1280X1024 resolution! This graphics chipset
easily surpasses TNT based cards for 2D Desktop Image Quality! I
would say it is even beyond the Matrox G200!
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| Winbench
99 1024X768, 16 Bit Color |
WinFast
5300 |
| WinBench
99/Business Disk WinMark 99 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
2050 |
| WinBench
99/Business Graphics WinMark 99 |
87.2 |
| WinBench
99/CPUmark32 |
908 |
| WinBench
99/Disk Playback/Bus:Overall (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
2050 |
| WinBench
99/FPU WinMark |
1570 |
We ran this test
at 1024X768. Again, although these are the best numbers we've seen,
this put this K6 based system in P2-450 range. Not bad for a
motherboard and processor for hundreds less.
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SiSoft
Sandra 98 CPU Benchmark
Click
image above for larger view...
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| SiSoft
Sandra thinks the K6(2) at 475 Mhz. handily beats the P2-400! |
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| So
how did the system fair with Quake 2 on a Voodoo 2??? You're going
to like this too... |
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Not too shabby
at all! We used the AMD K6 3DNow drivers on this test. I would say
mid 40s in Quake 2 is pretty good!
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Finally, here's
a look at the Video Driver panel for Win98.
Usually these
types of set ups have pretty generic drivers and tools. I was
pleased to see that this board came with this nice tweaking utility
for the desktop.
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Overall
Impression
This is a truely
unique boad that seems to be very stable and mature for a new
product. We had no compatibility issues and installation went
without a hitch! It took us literally 10 mins to install and
configure the entire system. As a result, this board can also be
very cost effective for resellers and systems configurators .
Although this board is limited to the PCI bus it does have good
capability in 2D graphics and 3D PCI solutions are inexpensive, good
performance enhancements you can add in to complete the system.
Finally, the on board audio was excellent with basic 3D spatializing
effects and a standard feature set of wavetable etc.
The WinFast
5300MA got a Temp-O-Meter Rating of...
80
! Big
features in a little board!
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| -Davo |
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