Good lord, there are more front side bus speed options on the ATC6254M than you can shake a stick at. A total of 29 different settings are selectable via the board's BIOS controls, Celeron overclockers will no doubt love the lower seven settings leading up to the holy grail of 100MHz from the standard 66MHz level.

Another feature of the ATC6254M that once again belies the "value" moniker is its support for up to 1GB of SDRAM. You can never be too rich or have too much RAM in the PC industry; it's always a good thing when a full gigabyte of SDRAM is possible on a mainboard.

A-Trend hasn't skimped on the ATC6254M's manual as some mainboard companies have recently, but instead included a full sized, very well written guide for the board. You won't find a sub-standard quick reference pamphlet and a CD in the ATC6254M's box, instead you'll be pleased to pickup a compact, yet detailed, full instructional manual.

You will find two CDs however that are full of drivers necessary for the board, which are easily loaded into Win95/98/NT via a setup utility.

Installing the 12" x 8.2" ATX form factor board required no extra jostling or modifications to two standard midsize ATX cases, and getting the ATC6254M up and running proved to be very low on the overall difficulty scale.

Performance of 440BX mainboards is almost legendary for the similarity from board to board. The ATC6254M was no different under our mainboard benchmark suite, it fell within 1% of our fastest group of tested mainboards under ZD's Winstone99.

The A-Trend board's integrated video performance was also very similar to a standalone 3dfx Voodoo3 2000 AGP card's + 440BX mainboard in our testing, each 3D benchmark result fell within a few percent of what we expected to find from previous experience with V3-2000 16MB cards.

Test System:
Intel Pentium III 500 CPU
ATrend ATC6254M Mainboard
128MB EMS PC133 HSDRAM (Running at 100MHz)
Western Digital Expert 18.1GB UDMA HD
Diamond MX300 PCI Audio Card
3dfx Driver Version: 4.11.01.1151

Test Conditions and Specifications:
All tests were run a total of four times. The highest and lowest scores were then dropped with the remaining two results averaged to determine final score. VSync was OFF for all video tests, allowing maximum frame rate performance. Quake3Test's graphic options were set to "Normal".