Anand Tech Report Card Rating
93/A-

The Good

"We don't imitate, We Innovate" - is the logo you'll see on the tiny box of the Chaintech 5AGM, stating Chaintech's intentions and their motivation for making a motherboard.  The 5AGM isn't like a toned down version of any FIC, ABIT, or Tyan motherboard, it is an innovative creation, unique in its class, made for the user, with the user in mind and with quality as a number one concern. 

Staying away from the ATX form factor, Chaintech managed to fit 3 PCI, 3 ISA, and 1 AGP slot onto the Baby AT 5AGM along with 2 DIMM and 2 SIMM slots.  While this leaves very little room for expansion, there isn't much more that could have been done when given the constraints of a Baby AT layout.   In spite of this, Chaintech managed to keep the configuration and setup of the 5AGM plain and simple.  While the board doesn't feature the Jumperless See-Pu Setup notorious for being included on Chaintech motherboards, the jumpers are a breeze to configure for an AT motherboard (location-wise).  The Chaintech manual, albeit reminiscent of the outstanding ABIT manuals, carries Chaintech's unique style across each page of the fairly thick manual.  The documentation includes all the basic information necessary for getting your board up and running, not to mention the sticker included in the rear of the manual that documents all of the major jumper settings and parts of the motherboard.

Chaintech chose to include an extremely useful CD-ROM with the 5AGM.  On the CD-ROM you can find a handful of useful utilities, in addition to the desperately sought-after VIA Bus Master IDE Drivers and the newest version of the VIA AGP Gart VxD, necessary for taking advantage of the sole AGP slot on the motherboard.

For you K6/266 & 300 users out there, the 5AGM does support the required 2.2v core voltage setting so you're not out of luck.   Along with a nice selection of voltage settings, the board also features official and unofficial settings for bus speeds ranging from 50 to 75MHz, unfortunately the 83.3MHz setting is absent from this motherboard as with most VP3 boards.

Dealing with stability, the 5AGM had no problems running the K6/266, Pentium MMX, or 6x86MX at normal and overclocked speeds.   Making this board the ideal AT form factor VP3 for those of you that are concerned with speed/reliability, it is obvious that Chaintech placed those two items at the top of their priority list with this motherboard among other things.  As with most VP3 boards, the Chaintech 5AGM performs much like its competition, however it differs from the rest of the pack in that the overall performance of the 5AGM doesn't show any weaknesses, as the Tyan Trinity did with the Pentium MMX.

The Bad

It seems like an 83MHz bus speed setting is too much to ask from a VP3 based motherboard, so we'll leave that out of "The Bad" section of this review, however the 5AGM's lack of expandability features do leave many AT fans (especially those with HUGE AT cases, looking to fill up a board with peripherals) in the dust with no hope of a solution.  If you don't plan on using too many expansion cards, or memory modules with your newly upgraded system, then you shouldn't have much of a problem with the 5AGM...otherwise, search for a new ATX case.

BIOS Settings

Recommended SDRAM

Recommended SDRAM: Corsair PC100 SDRAM; Memory Man PC100 SDRAM
SDRAM Tested: 1 x 64MB Corsair PC100 SDRAM; 1 x 64MB Memory-Man PC100 SDRAM

Manufacturer: Corsair Microsystems
Purchase Web-Site: http://www.nf-ny.com

Manufacturer: The Memory Man
Purchase Web-Site: http://www.memory-man.com

In recent times, choosing a motherboard cannot be completely determined by a Winstone score. Now, many boards come within one Winstone point of each other and therefore the need to benchmark boards against each other falls. Therefore you shouldn't base your decision entirely on the benchmarks you see here, but also on the technical features and advantages of this particular board, seeing as that will probably make the greatest difference in your overall experience.

How I Tested

• Each benchmark was run a minimum of 2 times and a maximum of 5 times, if the motherboard failed to complete a single test within the 5 allocated test runs the OS/Software was re-installed on a freshly formatted Hard Drive and the BIOS settings were adjusted to prevent the test from failing again.  All such encounters were noted at the exact time of their occurrence.

• Business Winstone 98 was run at each individually tested clock speed, if reliable scores were achieved with the first two test runs of the suite an average of the two was taken and recorded as the final score at that clock speed.  If the test system displayed erratic behavior while the tests were running or the results were incredibly low/high the tests were re-run up to 5 times and an average of all the test runs was taken and recorded at the final score at that clock speed

• After each motherboard was tested a complete format of the test hard drive was initiated and the OS/benchmarking software was re-installed afterwards a defragment was initiated using Windows 95's Disk Defragmentation Utility

• Tests using AGP Video cards were run under Winstone 97 and Winstone 98

• No foreign drivers were present in the test system other than those required for the system to function to the best of its ability

• All foreign installation files were moved to a separate partition during the test as to prevent them from effecting the test results

• All tests were conducted at 800 x 600 x 256 colors

The Final Decision

Not a major overclocker, but the Chaintech 5AGM lives up to the standards the market has set...and then some, therefore honorably taking the Anand Tech award for the Best VP3 motherboard built around an AT Form Factor.