Manufacturer Intel
Retail Price $120 

Expansion Slot : 4/2/1 

Notice that the Intel SE440BX does have that rapidly-becoming-standard jumperless setup feature. What’s with the jumpers then? Well, that’s to activate/deactivate the jumperless CPU setup. As in, first you cap the jumper, power up your system, edit your CPU settings in the Phoenix BIOS, power down, put the jumper back into its original position and then power up again. Complicated? A tad more so than not having the jumper at all, granted, but then on the plus side, this does ensure that there is no accidental or unauthorized modification of your CPU settings. In any case, this is not exactly an overclocker’s board, so I suppose the idea is that the user is not expected to have to go through the above procedure very often.

About overclocking- let’s get this out of the way first, since I mentioned it in the previous para- this is not an overclocker’s board. Notwithstanding the almost-jumperless setup, this board has practically no overclocking options and supports only the standard 66MHz and 100MHz bus speeds. I would like to point out, however, that not being designed for overclocking does not automatically disqualify a motherboard from being a good board. There are, after all, loads of people out there who never even think about overclocking their systems. Well, don’t think much about it, anyway.

The one thing all users invariably demand from their motherboards is not overclocking capability, or even raw performance- it’s stability. To begin at that most fundamental level, the SE440BX is a quality motherboard, designed for stability and reliability over speed. Considering that performance differences in BX boards are now notoriously negligible, to say those priorities are about right. The three DIMM slots simply will not accept anything other than PC100 SDRAM when running at the 100MHZ FSB setting,
which is kind of expensive seeing that the board itself isn’t exactly cheap. An extra PCI slot would not have been sneered at, either, seeing that the board opts for the classic 4 PCI/ 2 ISA/ 1 AGP (I PCI/ISA shared) configuration. 
 

The Intel SE440BX is a good, stable board without a doubt if you already own one. If you’re thinking of making the upgrade to one, however, remember that for an equivalent price you can certainly find boards with better expansion capabilities and certainly more features, including overclockability, as well as at least equivalent stability and performance. There’s the rub- now that the BX chipset is such a mature product, a merely “good” product often finds it difficult to compete on any ground against the paragons of excellence out there.  “Good” just isn’t good enough any more, and at this late stage, there’s no reason to opt for less than the best.