Manufacturer ASUStek
Retail Price $140 

Expansion Slot : 5/2/1 
Extra's : Additional bus speeds

There’s something with motherboard manufacturers and the letter A. Having got past Abit and AOpen, we come up with ASUS, whose biggest hit to date has surely been their P2B series. We’ve got two members of the P2B family in this roundup, and the first is the P2B-F, the tenth revision to the P2B line. ASUS has basically fine-tuned the original P2B- dropping one ISA slot in favor of a new PCI slot and the addition of an extra DIMM slot are two of the most noticeable changes. So the P2B-F now has a configuration of 5 PCI/2 ISA/1 AGP and 4 DIMM slots, which is just about the ideal configuration at the moment- enough PCI slots to go around as well as enough ISA slots to ensure backward-compatibility, plus the extra DIMM to take you all the way up to 1GB of RAM. But the best thing about the P2B-F is probably the introduction of new FSB speeds- 110, 115, 124, 140 and all the way up to a whopping 150 (yikes!). The board is fitted with ten capacitors to improve stability.
 

Another new feature introduced by the P2B-F revision is AGP clock selection, allowing you to pick between ratios of 1:1 or 2:3. Depending on, of course, whether you’re using a 66MHz bus speed (for which you need to pick the 1:1 ratio to set the AGP clock at the required 66MHz) or whether you’ve opted for a 100MHz bus speed (for which you have to pick the 2:3 ratio to set the AGP bus at 66MHz). What’s in the box? Well, other than the motherboard itself, you get the FDD & HDD cables, a collapsible holder for the Slot 1 CPU, the manual and guarantee card and a CD with drivers and utilities.

I have to point out here that the collapsible CPU holder isn’t that good- it’s just not providing enough support to SECC-2 Celeron CPUs.

Like the original P2B, ASUS have stolidly resisted the advent of the jumperless era with the P2B-F. If you were feeling nostalgic for jumpers (in the wake of the sudden boom in all varieties and variations on the theme of jumperless setups that have popped up recently) by all means take a good look at the P2B-F. Jumpers galore- you’ll never feel lonely again. ASUS provides an extensive and well-written manual detailing jumper configurations et al, so don’t worry about the lack of a jumperless setup (talk about double negatives…the lack of a jumperless setup?). And don’t get the impression that the ASUS P2B-F is not an overclocker’s board because there are jumpers on it (err…people were overclocking ages before jumperless setups, by messing with–what else?- jumpers), because such an impression would be totally erroneous. In fact, if you did receive such an impression, dear me, I urge you to lose it fast. Not only is the ASUS P2B-F not not an overclocker’s board  (all right, so I contrived that sentence deliberately…overclocking the English language here, that’s what we’re doing), it may well be the board most suited to overclocking ever built. Whether you’re talking stability or speed, the ASUS P2B-F rates up there at the very top, with the only possible competition being from the Abit BX6 2.0. You know how we (and most other reviewers as well) take pains to point out to you all the time that performance differences between BX boards are usually negligible? Well, the performance differences between the BX6 2.0 and the P2B-F would probably give the word “negligible” a whole new meaning, so why don’t we quit talking about it and get back to the point, which is the P2B-F and the story of its life. A word or two here about hardware monitoring; you need to buy the thermistor separately and fix it to the board to get CPU temperature monitoring and the works. Otherwise, the board will only give you system temperature figures. 
 

Though the P2B-F features some extra FSB speeds, you’ll need PC133 RAM to work above 140MHz, because most of the PC100 CAS-2 RAM we threw at it didn’t like working at 124MHz and above. And don’t expect to fine-tune the CPU to stabilize the thing, cause (here’s that old bogey again) you don’t get any voltage adjustments. On the plus side, however, the board does provide a lot of timing settings for your RAM. So that’s the other way you can ensure your system is stable- by tweaking your RAM. The P2B-F also provides PCI bus dividers of 3/1 and 4/1 to bring the PCI clock down on overclocked systems. The P2B-F was, as you might imagine, one of the fastest boards on this roundup, and is a great choice for speed freaks of every description.

Next up, we have a very close cousin of the P2B-F in the hot seat. Does the word SCSI set your pulse pounding and send adrenalin surging through your system? (Well, whether it does or not, read on…)