Micronics claims fastest PII board crown

Aimed at high-end workstations and servers, the Californian firm's mini-ATX Stingray and full ATX Dual Fortress boards both support EDO and ECC RAM and USB. The Dual Fortress can support dual-CPU operation and includes Yamaha sound and the LM78, a system monitoring chip that analyses criteria including temperature and fan speed to warn against impending hardware failure. A version of the Dual Fortress with Ultra Wide SCSI integrated is also available.

Nick Harwood, UK managing director of Micronics, said the boards will typically run significantly faster than Intel motherboard systems. "The Dual Fortress is already about 10 per cent faster than Intel according to Ziff-Davis Winstone benchmark tests and we can get it faster as we optimise for certain BIOSes," he said. "Intel has been very successful in the last two and a half years but we're there for the niche market that really needs performance. Intel is very vanilla; we're the turbo-charged version with all the bells and whistles on."

Micronics can be contacted by telephone on 01256-817722.