Truly, the flagship of the 440BX line.
Written: May 22 '01
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Completely jumperless. 4 Dimms and 6 PCI slots.
Cons: Still available, but lacking some modern features.
The Bottom Line: For 600mhz CPU speeds and below, a very good choice.
|
|
|
| grimjack2's Full Review: ASUS P3B-F Motherboard |
I bought this motherboard around August of 1999, and it is still serving me well today, over a year and a half later. I chose this motherboard because it was called the 'flagship' motherboard of the 440BX chipset. What I really liked about it was the fact that it had only 1 ISA slot, and 4 Dimms. Many motherboards at the time still had 3 ISA, and either 2 or 3 Dimm slots. As a matter of fact, a lot of motherboards I see coming from the major manufacturers still don't have 4 available memory slots!
The motherboard has some other nice features:
- Power on from the keyboard
- 4 Dimm Slots that take up to 256 meg Dimms
- Antivirus capability built into the BIOS
- Bus speed configurable completely from the BIOS
- CPU & Power supply fan speed from software
- Completely jumper free BIOS for everything else
Another nice feature is a large green light on the motherboard. When I was going to switch graphic cards, I noticed the light, didn't know what it was, so I looked it up in the manual. Turns out the light did its job! It exists merely to tell me that there is power going to the motherboard. I had turned off my machine, but from the switch in front, and not the power supply in back. If I had tried switching cards while there was power going to it, I could have damaged the motherboard, the cards, or both!
The temperature readings from the included ASUS software (or the BIOS) are nice, because it helped me determine that some random crashes weren't heat related. One problem with the motherboard is that in order to have more than 4 PCI slots, some of the slots have to share IRQs. In my case the AGP slot shares the IRQ with slot 1, and 3 & 5 and 4 & 6, share IRQs as well.
Note: There are two versions of this motherboard that do not have different boxes or anything! One has 5 PCI slots, and the other has 6.
The random crashes I was having were due to a Sound Blaster Live Value edition. This card cannot handle shared IRQ slots, and I had to put it into slot 2, which is the only slot that doesn't share any IRQs. I don't know if there are any other cards that are like this, but this could be a big problem if you need to be two or more onto this motherboard.
Another problem with the board is that it is a little old now, and has some limitation with the newest hardware. It is only x2 AGP, which really doesn't make a difference yet, but x4 is the new standard. Also, it only has an ATA 33UMDA, which is noticeably slower with most of the newer hard drives available.
And of course I should mention that this motherboard is the now defunct Slot 1, which means I cannot really upgrade past a P3 800, and that is using a $25 adapter. I don't believe they have manufactured slot 1 CPUs for over a year, and they are almost impossible to find, so the adapter is necessary. The samples in the manual only go up to 600 MHz, but I've read people who put in 700 MHz with no problems at all.
I'm happy with the motherboard, and I recommend it for anyone who is constantly adding new hardware, or likes to tweak with their settings.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 150
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
grimjack2
|
 - Top 500 |
|
Location: San Rafael, CA, Marin County
Reviews written: 181
Trusted by: 124 members
About Me:
Film is my favorite art form. I live a life of constant amelioration.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.