A great product once the latest fixes and drivers loaded
Written: Jul 30 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Expandable, Affordable, Solid, Features, Name Brand
Cons: Clocking chip on early models may overheat if overclocked, needs 4.22 VIA drivers to run solid and fast.
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| dougmjones's Full Review: Asus P3V4X |
Once I upgraded the board to BIOS revision 1005 and reset the configuration under the BIOS and then reinstalled the operating systems of Windows2000 Pro and Windows 98 SE I was able to get good stable performance out of this mother board. The other fix I made was applying a cooling heatsink from radio shack for the CLOCKING chip on the motherboard. Even though I do not overclock , I found a few articles on the overheating of this 133mhz clocking chip that is located right beside the SDRAM slots. My chip was very hot to the touch. Once I have heatsinked it I feel like the motherboard is very stable and no wierd crashes, hangs etc.
With the latest VIA 4.22 driver kit I can now run under Win98 SE with my harddrive and CDroms in DMA mode. The Seagate ATA66 disk gets almost 18mb per second now. I am not super satisfied with CDrom performance and the motherboard seems to not like the Kenwood 72X CDrom drives. Once I bought a CompUSA 56X it runs great.
The last thing I did to ensure a solid as a rock system was purchase GREAT memory. I bought the EMS HSDRAM PC133 brand from www.pc133memory.com. With SDRAM prices back up the EMS memory was not but about 25.00 dollars more per 128mb stick. I bought and use 2 x 128mb PC133. My friends that bought generic PC133 via internet couldnt even get WIndows to finish installing. Some very strange behavior. Then they bought the EMS and like magic its solid as a rock now.
I especially like the 6 PCI slots and 1 isa. The monitoring software is nice. After removing the heatsink pads on my CPU coolers and using old fashioned heatsink compound and along with my other cooling fix I am able to run at 86f degrees on the motherboard and about 98f degrees on the 733/133 Pentium III CPU.....
Asus support was very difficult to contact and also surprized that the Asus forums on the web did not seem to work. I had to figure out all my problems by myself for the most part and via the internet.
I am not totally convinced of Asus support and how good they are. I think they give crappy support like most people these days. Maybe not as bad as some.
This is an excellent value motherboard and is farily well designed. Has AXP4x, ATA66, many slots, and 133 mhz front side bus. Must have good PC133 memory to operate. I would buy another one.
Here's a note on the hot chip....
http://www.lostcircuits.com/motherboard/asus_p3v4x/6.html
"Like all ASUS boards, the P3V4X is extremely stable under almost all conditions, that is up to 150 MHz bus speed. Above that, there was an occasional boot at 155 MHz but no success going past the POST screen. Thanks to Mish who pointed my attention to this thread, we were able to resolve this problem with cooling of the ICS 9250BF-18 clock generator. According to Eric from ICS, this particular clock generator was not meant to run beyond 133 MHz in the first place and overclocking it beyond 150 MHz causes overheating and thermal runaway. Using the heatsink / fan shown, we were able to run 100% stable at 155 MHz (128 MB DIMMs) and POST at 160 MHz."
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 112.00
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Epinions.com ID:
dougmjones
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 - Top 1000 |
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Location: Atlanta , Ga
Reviews written: 78
Trusted by: 24 members
About Me:
Computers, Music, Quality toys and gadgets. Like to review products that I demo or purchase.
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