The fastest motherboard I have tested to date
Written: Nov 04 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fastest motherboard, latest technology, support everything, no ISA slots, rock solid performance
Cons: Still pricey, runs sluggish on 98 (although kicks butt on Windows ME and Windows 2000)
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| matwood's Full Review: Asus CUSL2 |
I have owned/sold almost every brand of motherboard since the early 80's and have never come across such a sweet motherboard in my life. The features I was looking for in a motherboard was the support of ATA-100, AGP 4x, PC-133 RAM, and supported Pentium 3 processors. After looking at chipsets such as the BX, 820, 840, Via Apollo Pro, etc., the only chipset that gave these features was the 815 chipset. Furthermore, only a few vendors have started manufacturing motherboard based off this chipset. Since building computers from the 80's, I have gone the full circuit from socket 7, to slot 1, slot 2 (for Xeon processors) and now back to socket 370. I was apprehensive to go to a socket 370 since I have had wonderful results with slot 1. Again, no manufacturers seemed to have a slot 1 board with the 815 set.
I was upgrading my system to the following:
This motherboard
866 Mhz processor
128 Megs PC-133 RAM
existing PC DVD Encore Dxr2
Western Digital 40 gig ATA 100 hard drive
Voodoo 5500 AGP 4x video card
Soundblaster Plantinum
HP CD-WRITER (10x4x32)
The first motherboard I received was a dud. I brought it back to the store, which had special ordered it for me, and they happened to have a replacement, which has been rock solid. Their opinion was that ASUS produced excellent motherboards that last forever - but have a higher defect rate than the competition. After researching the web with hearing no complaints, I decided to try Asus, and was one of the unlucky ones to get a defective board. With the new board in hand, I swapped out my old Abit BX6 R2 board and 400 Mhz P2 CPU, and then formatted the hard drive and started from scratch installing Windows 98.
This is where the fun did not begin. After it installed, I added the drivers to support the new chip set for Windows 98 SE - this went fine. However, when I added the sound card drivers and network drivers, it now took over 1 minute to boot the system. After playing with the IRQ's, nothing seemed to work. Apparently, Windows 98 still has issues with PCI sharing.
Undaunted, I started trying different combinations of network cards/sound cards with the same results. Finally, I decided to try Windows ME.
Boy what a difference! With my system as described above, I can boot into windows IN UNDER 10 SECONDS!!!!!!!!!! My earlier experience with ME was that it performed nominally on BX motherboards, but on 815 boards, it smoked! You also did not need the 815 drivers because ME comes with them. The only thing I had to do was upgrade my CD-Writer software and sound card to Windows ME drivers and the system rocked. Also, the DVD player would pause while playing. After upgrading the software, and isolating it to it's own IRQ by disabling the external USB (there are two controllers for a total of 5 ports, by disabling, I now have only 2 ports, but hey, who really needs more at this time?), everything works.
Final Analysis: This system is fast, and with socket 370, it produces MUCH LESS HEAT than slot 1/slot 2!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 160
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Epinions.com ID:
matwood
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Member: Michelle Atwood
Reviews written: 21
Trusted by: 3 members
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