Intel 850 Motherboard Roundup: September 2001

Intel D850GB

Click to Enlarge

Intel boards are often left out of reviews and roundups within the hardware enthusiast community simply because their boards don’t offer a lot of features (overclocking, RAID, etc.) that would make them competitive in this environment. Nevertheless, Intel is probably the biggest supplier of motherboards in the OEM market and is well known to have extremely stable and reliable products.  For that reason, we’ll be including Intel boards whenever possible from now on, both as a reference point and for those of you that don’t need the additional features that other manufacturers offer.

This time around, we found that the D850GB generally performs slightly better than the competition.  Not surprisingly, stability was also the best among this group. As we suggested earlier, however, the problem with the D850GB is that there is simply no overclocking or tweaking options available. 

Also not surprising is the fact that the D850GB is one of the few boards on the market that truly requires an ATX 2.03 compliant case, at least in its shipping form.  A simple replacement of the HSF mounts would alleviate this problem, although finding these parts is likely quite difficult.

Despite the lack of tweaking features, the board is still doing quite well in terms of sales thanks to its excellent performance and stability.