Nice Board, Tricky Setup
Written: Nov 28 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Very stable, once setup
Cons: Tricky setup
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| randomaccess's Full Review: Asus P3V4X |
I had been an ASUS owner for several years, since back in the days of the Pentium series of processors. When I upgraded to a Pentium II board, my local reseller was using DAEWOO motherboards with very good success, so on his recommendation I used a Daewoo board for my PII.
I was very happy with this board initially, however Daewoo eventually stopped supporting it with BIOS updates, even removing the page from their site. Any number of emails to them went unanswered. This was very disappointing to me.
Under normal conditions the BIOS on a motherboard may never have to be updated, but with changes in technology occurring so quickly, you might eventually run into an upgrade you really want, like a new graphics card, that requires the latest BIOS to operate correctly.
Keeping this in mind, when the time came to build a new system, I decided to go back to ASUS, because they do keep their BIOS current, and there is good support for ASUS products both from the company and user-to-user on the internet.
I chose the P3V4x because it had quite a bit of room for expansion, 6 PCI slots, and 4 memory slots. I had never owned a board with a non-Intel chipset, but again, there was so much information around on the VIA chipsets I decided to give the board a try.
Installation is straightforward, the manual is excellent. The board I received had the latest BIOS already installed. ASUS also supplies anti-virus and hardware monitoring software with the board.
The tricky part with setting up the VIA chipset is proper installation of the drivers for the board and their interaction with the graphics card drivers. Make sure you have the latest drivers for each. VIA periodically updates is 4in1 driver package.
My graphics card is the Matrox G400 dual head. Matrox requires that you completely remove their driver, check in safe mode manually for any files left over, then install the VIA 4in1 driver pack. After this installation you can then install the Matrox driver.
I am pleased overall with the performance of the board, unfortunately I cannot run the G400 at 4x AGP, only 2x. This seems to be a VIA problem, not necessarily an ASUS problem, but current benchmarks don't show any difference between the two speeds, so I am not too concerned.
Knowing all of this, would I have chosen a different board at this point? Possibly an Intel 815 chipset, but I am satisfied with the setup I have right now, and there is always something new just around the corner so in a year who knows what might be available.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 110
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Epinions.com ID:
randomaccess
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Member: Bob
Location: NJ
Reviews written: 53
Trusted by: 9 members
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