A Prima Donna
Written: Nov 10 '00 (Updated Dec 11 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fast, great I/O features.
Cons: Expensive, has some quirks.
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| oscen's Full Review: Asus CUSL2 |
Edited 12-11-2000. With the rather disappointing debut of the Pentium 4, I have removed my caution about waiting for the next generation of technology and upped the rating to five stars. The price is still high, the technology is now outdated and this motherboard can be quirky, but it is what I would buy for my own or someone else's system.
Having decided on the 815 chipset for a PIII 733 FCPGA, I picked the cusl2 based on its speed in testing, generally favorable reviews and my good experience with ASUS motherboards.
I built it as a Linux development machine (RedHat 6.2). I had some burn in problems with it (see www.cusl2.com), but otherwise it presented no real difficulties. When completed, it ran stably and very fast.
The cusl2 has extra USB ports, tons of wakeup features and support for AGP 4x, overclocking, ATA100 and all the usual stuff. I did not use the builtin video (sharing memory is a very bad idea), and had no problems with an addin AGP card.
I was a little disappointed with some of the bios settings. For example, when you boot to a disk other than the primary, windows (I loaded windows 98SE to test) sees the disk as other than "C:". If you build a multiple disk system, this is a hassle. Perhaps this and other minor annoyances are (will be) cleared up in a later bios revision.
All in all, I was happy with the cusl2. It has my strong recommendation, but an inexperienced system builder may have some difficulties with it... or may not.
You might try www.googlegear.com and www.pricewatch.com for a good price. I paid 149 plus tax at a local store.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 161
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Epinions.com ID:
oscen
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Reviews written: 15
Trusted by: 0 members
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