Manufacturer A-Trend
Retail Price $120 

Expansion Slot : 4/2/1 

Did we mention the strange fixation motherboard manufacturers have with the letter A? Probably just so that they'll be in the lead when people list them alphabetically, like we're doing now. Well, A-Trend isn't in luck there since Abit, AOpen and ASUS have had their turn, but A-Trend is certainly striking gold with this board, the 6241.
 

This is a remake of their highly successful 6240 board, adding built-in sound via the Yamaha 724/740 3D PCI sound chip and of course, support for more bus speeds. Supported bus speeds range from 66, 68, 75, 83, 100, 103, 112, 117, 124, 129, 133, 143, 148 and 153MHz. CPU clock ratios can be adjusted using DIP switches, but this isn't exactly practical unless you have an older CPU that isn't clock-locked. Clock ratios (just for the record) range from 3x to 7x in 0.5 increments. Unfortunately, the board doesn't offer voltage manipulation, which means it's pretty much like most other boards in this roundup. Other than that, the 6241 has excellent hardware monitoring features thanks to the Winbond W83781D chipset. A-Trend ships a thermistor cable with this board into the bargain. You can paste the thermistor to the heatsink (or the CPU itself, if you prefer) and CPU temperature monitoring is a piece of cake. As for documentation, A-Trend have included not one, but two very detailed manuals- one's the usual users manual and the other is the LANDesk Client Manager installation manual.

The 6241 follows the classic 4/2/1 PCI/ISA/AGP configuration. Needless to say, a fifth PCI slot would be welcome, but it's understandable that something had to give after the inclusion of the integrated sound chip. On the other hand, the integrated sound chip is pretty much what we've come to expect (unfortunately enough) from integrated sound chips- it's not very good.

It might have been a better idea to include the extra PCI slot instead. Like most other new boards, this board offers jumperless setup (not counting the DIP switches for setting up the clock ratios) and offers four DIMM sockets that can support up to 1GB of memory. Unfortunately, the board doesn't allow you to manually adjust AGP clock ratios, but instead assigns clock ratios automatically depending on your system bus speed. The IDE and floppy connectors are very conveniently located in front of the DIMM sockets, and the CMOS clearing jumpers are similarly located in front of the battery.

When it comes to overclocking, this is a very good board. The only real downer is that it lacks voltage manipulation, but in every other sense this is practically meant for overclocking. We ran a Pentium III 450 at 558MHz with a TennMax P3TF cooler at 124MHz with no problems at all. We also managed to get a classic Celeron 300A up and running at a 112MHz bus speed. Of course, we were using CAS-2 PC-100 memory but even then, the motherboard was very stable at 112 and 124MHz. At 133MHz, of course, it's your usual story- this is where the board moved out of absolute rock-solid country, but it was still quite impressive. Keep in mind, at 133MHz we switched PC-133 memory for the PC-100 modules. A word or two about performance- to complement its sheer overclockability, the board also performs extremely well. This is definitely a board not to ignore, especially when considering its price. It's highly stable, very overclockable and performs well under pressure. The only features missing are manual selection of AGP clock ratios, voltage manipulation and, dare we say it, a fifth PCI slot. Otherwise, watch this board.