Could this be the Easiest Motherboard to Overclock Ever?
Written: Jan 23 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Many options and features.
Cons: Haven’t found one yet.
The Bottom Line: This is a fine board with many options and features.
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| grimjack2's Full Review: Asus CUSL2 |
I haven’t had to buy a new motherboard separate from a new system for about two years before I bought this one last September. I thought there would have been huge advancements, but not really for the power and price range I was looking for. I needed a reliable board that could handle Intel P3s, and everything else was just dressing.
Most of the options that I was really impressed with reading the specs on this board exist with most of the competitors. Still, the three computer stores near me all seem to like this board because of the price, reliability, technical support, BIOS upgrades, and name recognition.
This motherboard comes in many different flavors featuring various add-ons. It isn’t on the ASUS web site, but the computer store told me that you can still get one that has a shared ISA / PCI slot on it.
Some of the features that I could have gotten but didn’t:
Onboard AC97 audio
USB hub CNR card
Lan CNR card
ASUS consumer brand Infrared set
My CUSL2 has:
An Intel 815EP chipset
66/100/133 MHz FSB
3 DIMM slots that can each handle PC133 or PC100 SDRAM
1 AGPx4 speed
5 PCI (2.2 standard)
1 CNR port (for mini modems or NICs) shared with a PCI slot
2 UltraDMA 100/66/33 IDE ports
2 USB (1.1), 1 Parallel, 1 Serial, 1 PS/2 KB & Mouse
Award BIOS, Green
It is of regular size for an ATX form factor, at 8.2" x 12”
Included with the board were various pieces of hardware:
- 40pin 80 conductor ribbon cable for internal UltraDMA drives.
- Ribbon cable for ordinary master and slave IDE drives.
- Cable for floppy drives
- Spare jumpers
- 2 port USB connector set – this allows you to add 2 more USB ports to the rear of the machine.
- Com2 bracket
Also in the box comes a CD, which includes various software applications. One of them is ASUS PC Probe, which is a Windows application that you can run to monitor the CPU temperature, the CPU fan rotation speed, and the power supply fan rotation speed. You can tell it to sound an alarm if something goes out of a range you specify as safe. You can also see these readings and have alerts from the BIOS. How much of a drain on resources and CPU cycles is hard to measure, but it didn’t seem like very much at all.
One feature I like is the fact that it has an onboard LED so you know when the motherboard is still on. When you do a shutdown, since it can be powered back up by a keypress, there is still some power going to it. A few times, I’ve shut off a machine and was about to remove or install a card, and that green light told me that there is still power going to the machine even though it seemed to be off.
It features:
An optional jumperless collection of options, Fan and temperature monitoring, CPU Throttle, Suspend to RAM, Stepless Frequency Selection, Vcore & Vio Adjustable, and built in firmware virus protection.
We installed an Intel P3-933mhz PCU on the board. The instructions say that it can take anything from a Celeron 333 or P2-450 up to a P3-1.2 ghz. I think it could take a 1.4, but that chip may not have been out when the book was printed.
I installed one 256 meg Dimm on the board. As cheap as memory is now (less than $30 for 256 Megs!), it is recommended not to get over 512 Megs total or else the system may hang at boot up. This seems a little low considering how easily I could see myself getting 1 gig, just because it is so cheap now.
The book also discusses something I’m often loath to do on my own machines, overclocking. For easy overclocking (their suggestion, not mine) there is a stepless frequency selection to adjust the FSB frequency in 1 MHz increments. They actually advertise the ability to easily overclock! I'm a little surprised by this, since it could shorten the lifespan of the CPU. I bet if it could shorten the lifespan of the motherboard they would never be promoting this.
Reading other reviews on this site and others, I have read nowhere of anyone who has had a fatal hardware crash after overclocking their system. If this were my own game system, and not a work machine I was building for a client, I might try it to see what sort of performance improvement I get, but I doubt it. Usually the speed gains from overclocking are pretty minimal, but I know there are people who buy motherboards like this because that is the first thing they intend to do.
If you are one of those people this motherboard is probably just what you are looking for.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 110
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Epinions.com ID:
grimjack2
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Location: San Rafael, CA, Marin County
Reviews written: 181
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About Me:
Film is my favorite art form. I live a life of constant amelioration.
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