HOW TO UPGRADE YOUR MOTHERBOARD
                     Submitted by: Gloria Short


  The rapid price drops in the PC world have put a lot of us in an
  uncomfortable position. What was a good buy just 24 months ago
  seems laughably lame now. PC prices have always dropped,
  sometimes quickly, sometimes less quickly, but never as in the
  past two years. As a result, there are a lot of us out there who
  paid $2,500 for a fully loaded 386SX system in early 1991, and
  find it kind of disturbing to open up a liquidator catalog and
  see that same system for $700.

  It's disturbing, yes... but not unrepairable. If you bought a
  generic clone system (as I recommended in 1991 and recommend
  now), then the upgrade path is smooth and sure: get a new
  motherboard. Most clones use the same size motherboard, no matter
  which processor is on the motherboard.

  For $350, you can move up to a 33-MHz 386DX system with the speed
  advantages that 64K of processor cache brings. For a steeper
  $900, you can get a 33-MHz 486DX motherboard with VESA local bus
  capability, offering the possibility of local bus video and
  blazingly fast Windows performance. Add another $200, and for
  $1100 you can get a motherboard that supports both VESA local bus
  and the advanced Extended Industry Standard Architecture (EISA)
  bus all on one board. A motherboard like that would be the
  foundation of one of the fastest PCs on the planet.

  One problem with buying a new motherboard is that there are no
  big names in the motherboard business, no IBMs or Compaqs.
  Instead, there are a lot of small and medium-sized vendors with
  products that are often good or excellent--but are sometimes
  quite bad. Anyone can tell you that when you buy a motherboard,
  you must consider the processor chip, megahertz, and BIOS
  manufacturer: 486s are faster than 386s but are more expensive,
  more megahertz means greater speed but also greater cost. You'll
  also hear that you'll experience the least compatibility hassles
  if you stay with a BIOS builder such as Award, American
  Megatrends (AMI), or Phoenix. But there's a lot more to buying
  the right motherboard. I know this because I've bought a lot of
  the wrong motherboards. So here's a roundup of things to look for
  and things to avoid.

  EIGHT EXPANSION SLOTS While it shouldn't be something you should
  have to ask for, a number of motherboard manufacturers make their
  boards a bit cheaper by omitting a few expansion bus slots.
  There's no point in forking over your hard-earned cash to get a
  motherboard that won't let you plug in enough boards to take you
  through the next five years. In just a few years, a baseline
  system will contain one board with the
  parallel/serial/floppy/IDE/game-port interfaces, another board
  for video, perhaps another board for video capture, another for
  sound, a CD-ROM interface, and a LAN card (yes, even if you're in
  a small business or a home). That makes six slots the minimum.
  Eight slots guarantee that you can use whatever comes down the
  pike (perhaps a virtual reality interface?)

  COMPLETE BUS MASTER SUPPORT ON EISA SLOTS You should also
  consider a motherboard that has EISA (Extended Industry Standard
  Architecture) compatibility, rather than the more common ISA
  (Industry Standard Architecture). It's only about $100-$200 more,
  and it assures that you'll be able to use the faster EISA boards
  as they become available. Many are already available, and their
  improved performance makes them well worthwhile. But be sure that
  you get full-featured EISA slots. One feature of EISA that makes
  it so fast is called bus mastering, but not all EISA slots
  support it. In fact, I've seen motherboards that only support bus
  mastering on two slots! Unfortunately, those two slots are
  usually the most easily-accessible slots, the ones that can
  accommodate large boards, and you may need those slots for ISA
  cards that are just plain too big. Be sure that any EISA
  motherboard supports bus mastering on at least half of the slots.

  WATCH FOR PROTRUDING CONNECTORS, JUMPERS, SIMMS, AND DIP
  SWITCHES. I can't tell you how many motherboards I've seen with
  the memory set up so that it keeps you from installing a full
  length card in two or three of the eight slots. When the SIMMs
  stick up an inch or two, it's impossible to use a full-length
  card that extends all the way down to the motherboard, as many
  do. Some motherboards have a cluster of Berg connectors (they
  look like metal pins sticking up off the boards; small
  black-plastic rectangular wiring connectors attach to them) that
  are for the reset switch, the turbo switch, the keylock, and the
  power light. Because the wires stick into this area, it's
  difficult to use full-length boards in this space. Other
  motherboards have their board clearance hampered by jumpers or
  DIP switches.

  THE MOTHERBOARD SHOULD BE RELATIVELY INFLEXIBLE.