Rock Solid
Written: Aug 02 '00 (Updated Jan 19 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Stable Like A Rock; Easily Configured; Jumpers
Cons: A Bit Pricey; Jumpers
The Bottom Line: I have experienced zero problems with this motherboard. What I HAVE had is a very stable Windows98 platform.
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| Sunliner's Full Review: Asus P2B-F |
I built my computer about a year and a half ago, and I chose the Asus P2B-F motherboard as the basis of it. My system is a Celeron 400, with 128meg of PC-100 CAS2 ECC memory, an Asus TNT video card, SoundBlaster Live! Value soundcard and an IBM 10gb 7200rpm hard drive. That's all by way of background.
The Asus motherboard was one of the more pricey ones on Pricewatch.com, and rang in at about $132. It comes with five PCI slots and two ISA slots, as well as an AGP slot for video. An IDE controller is onboard. Several hardware websites, including Tom's Hardware Page, highly recommend this board for its stability and overclockability. Personally, I'm not much of an overclocker -- I ran my 400MHz chip at 450MHz once just for the heck of it, but reset it to standard. Actually, even though the board has settings for a bus speed up to 150MHz, I run it at the 66MHz that's standard for Celerons.
The P2B-F came with a decent manual which provided an accurate map of the jumper locations. That's right, the P2B has jumpers for the settings. I like jumpers...but I'm somewhat of an anachronism, harking back to the days of the 80286 and beyond. Anyway, the jumper settings were straightforward enough to configure for the right frontside bus speed, voltage setting, clock multiplier, PCI device speed and so on.
The BIOS provided with the P2B-F is, again, straightforward and easy to set up. It's so "vanilla" that I can't pick on any particular feature to talk about. It just set up very quickly.
In the past year and a half, I have experienced zero problems with this motherboard. Possibly the high quality memory I purchased has contributed to this, but in any event I have had no system instability or any hardware conflicts or incompatibility. What I HAVE had is a very stable Windows98 platform.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 132
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Epinions.com ID:
Sunliner
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 - Top 1000 |
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Member: Nick
Location: Sweet Home Alabuckley, Michigan
Reviews written: 103
Trusted by: 53 members
About Me:
Am I still writing things on Epinions? Wow.
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