Excellent for the money and fast
Written: Sep 30 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Official accepts DDR(2700) Ram and is very easy to setup and overclock.
Cons: No usb 2.0 or extra firewire ports, for those who want them.
The Bottom Line: A great DDR board for Intel P4 users. Not the best, but it doesn't cost an arm and a leg either.
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| alphaproject's Full Review: ASUS P4S533 Intel Socket 478 |
This mobo was a snap to install. I had no troubles at all and when paired with top-of-the-line DDR ram, you can overclock a P4 2.53 CPU to around 2.8 gigs.
It has plenty of PCI slots and 1 AGP slot as usual.
The bios is pretty simple to understand and easy to tweak.
If you are running DDR2700 Ram, you will have to change the memory ratio to 4:5 to get the extra bandwidth out of the memory though. I suggest getting DDR3000 or even 3200 and running the ratio at 4:6 and getting near PC1066 bandwidth. The faster the ram, the better your system will perform and spending the extra money on quality ram is no joke. I bought DDR2700 Ram, but I didn't get the best I could and now I regret it. I can only run 145 fsb and it's not that stable. If I had Crucial or Corsair, I'd be able to run 150 fsb and it would be stable. Ram is even more important that you think. It is the sole stability for a successful overclock too. I rarely overclock anyways, but I'd like to know that I could if I wanted to. I can get up to 2.7 though, which is 200 megs plus speed.
The board comes with an excellent manual and an easy bios update program. Getting the bios downloaded is another task though. I just got it manually instead of using their auto update feature. It simply wouldn't show up, but I knew there was an update bios out there.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 90
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Epinions.com ID: alphaproject
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Reviews written: 111
Trusted by: 2 members
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