Wednesday, September 15, 1998

Introduction

Worldwide praised, this motherboard has gathered all the honors on every website where it has been reviewed. Thus I'll will cover this review with some enthusiasm because I am a bit curious to find out if my evaluation of this motherboard goes along with my predecessors. I also want to mention that this card has been generously provided by SID Distribution Canada.

At first glance, I didn't find anything exceptional on this motherboard. Actually, even if the design is quite carefully implemented, I didn't find any major innovation. Except a function that allow to start the computer by simply using the space bar of the keyboard and a system that detect opening of the casing. But nothing that can really make the difference compared to other similar motherboard.

The layout of the various components is good and is well made. The possibility of expansion is good but rather limited in my opinion because there is only 3 memory banks available. Provided with 4 PCI slots, 3 ISA slots, one AGP port and 3 memory banks. This motherboard offer to it owner enough possibilities for a high-end usage. The only glitch that I found is that some jumpers are located between slots which become no more accessible once the slots are used.

A picture of this motherboard is presented right below so that you can have a look by yourself on the layout.

Functionalities

Even if this is a new board, it doesn't offer any Jumper-less functionality and still uses jumpers to configure the frequency of the processor and the bus. Thanks to the jumpers it is possible to use unusual multipliers factors from 2.0x to 8.0x by .5x steps. Moreover, the frequency of the bus can be selected from a wide scale, practically from 66mhz to 133mhz offering at the same time unconventional frequencies like 83mhz and 112mhz. Even if I said earlier that this card was a bit obsolete with it's jumper based system, this card still has to offer undeniable possibilities for overclocking fans. One thing to remember is that high frequencies of the bus can only be reached if 8ns or even 6ns SDRAM memory is used because 10ns memory components won't work correctly above 112mhz and not at all at 133mhz! As a conclusion, provided with a broad variety of functionality, jumpers gives the false impression of an old fashion motherboard and it would certainly benefit from the latest technology at this point in order to be a genuine advanced motherboard.

Finally, before talking about the tests, I'd like to say a word on the manual included with this motherboard. I have to confess that the writing deceived me. Some problems are presented and the rest lacks clarity and precision in the conception. We can noticed that some topics are missing and better some mistake can be pointed out. For instance, the jumper identified as JTPWR on the motherboard is not mentioned in the jumpers description section while another described under the name PWR.SW is referred as a jumper with 2 pins even though it is really part of a jumper group located in the connectors panel. Also the HD led is not mentioned at all in the manual even if it is present on the motherboard. There is no polarity indication on the pins so that I had to try different combinations before I could make it work! Same thing with the BIOS parameters where some tuning are not explained in the manual. Finally, the font used to write the manual is so small that I had to use a lens to magnify the text while I was reading it.

The Benchmarks

The tests were all performed under Win95.

The system setup was as following:

Motherboard: Asus P2B
CPU: Intel Pentium II 350mhz
Memory: 128mb PC100 SDram (LGS)
IDE first channel Primary port: Quantum Fireball EIDE ST 3.2A
IDE second channel Primary port: AOPEn CD-ROM drive CD-936E
PCI slot number 2: Matrox Millenium 4Wram graphic card
ISA slot number 2: Ensoniq Soundscape soundcard
ISA slot number 1: US Robotic 56k X2 modem
OS: Win95n 4.00.950

The first test bench used was Winbench98 CPU Mark32. This test was done 3 times in a row as reveal the following results.

Winbench98 CPUmark 32

We can observe a neat difference in favor of the P2B motherboard on the AOpen AX6B. Indeed, the maximum CPUmark32 index given to the AOpen AX6B was only of 872 while the value reached by the P2B was 905 representing a performance near 4% in favor of the P2B for this measure. So we can suspect that the P2B is establishing a better relation with the processors than the AOpen AX6B.

The following test was also extract from the Winbench98 suite and is addressed specifically for the arithmetic unit of the processor.

Winbench98 FPU Winmark

Here, the differences are smaller and less significant. Whereas the AX6B reach a maximum value of 1790 for this test, the P2B obtained 1810 as the maximum value. So, no significant variation between this two board at the arithmetic co processor exchange level.

Winstone98

Although very slightly lower than the performances of the AOpen AX6B motherboard, the Asus P2B motherboard is doing very well and is at a bit of the performances of the AX6B as the measurements taken under Winstone 98 above shows us.

As we need another thing than the performances tests to distinguish the real qualities of a motherboard, this evaluation table will really be useful to better determine the strong points and weak points of this motherboard by representing the whole thing in a figure of global merit. The results obtained are thus represented in a global index of quality that will used by us as additional data elements intended to better evaluate this board.

The evaluation grid now give us a better overall picture of this motherboard by granting it an excellent note of 85 points on a possibility of 100. Thus, it follow closely the AOpen AX6B which has obtained 88 points in the same circumstances.

Strong Points

This board strong points are its excellent overclockability, thanks to its broad range of choice of bus frequencies and its great choice of multiplying factor. Besides, its excellent stability exceeds that of the majority of the other motherboards.

Weak Points

he principal gaps of this motherboard are the bad design of the users manual, the smalls possibilities of memory expansion due to the presence of only three memory banks, its aging design that use jumpers instead of a "SoftMenu" design integrated to the BIOS, and finally, the bad positioning of some connectors between the expansion slots.

Conclusions

In conclusion, I would recommend this motherboard to the experienced users who have already several installations at their credit and to the unconditional of overclocking which will be very well served by this motherboard as long as they are resourceful enough. As for the other user categories, I would better recommend a board whose design of the users manual is neater and especially which calls upon the "SoftMenu" instead of simple jumpers.

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