Asus P3V4X Motherboard

This is a Slot 1 motherboard from Asus based on VIA Apollo

Pro133A chipset. The board has support for AGP 4x cards, meant for high-end

graphics work. The motherboard supports FSB of 66, 100, and 133 MHz, so you can

add PIII, PIIIE, and PIIIEB, as well as Celeron processors in its Slot 1. The

board has DIP switches that can be set to Auto mode to let the BIOS

automatically recognize the processor you put in. You can also manually adjust

the DIP switch settings to get the right speed for your processor.

The

board has four DIMM slots that can handle up to 2 GB of SDRAM. It also supports

the latest HSDRAM. It has six PCI slots, enough to handle any further expansion.

An ISA slot can put any old cards that you might have to use. The board has all

the regular ports–one parallel, two serial, PS/2, and USB ports. These are all

color coded for easy recognition.

We tested the motherboard for productivity applications,

graphics and gaming, and compared it against the Asus P3BF motherboard–a

winner in the motherboard shootout earlier this year (see PC Quest February

2000, page 93).

The P3V4X fared well in productivity applications, scoring

almost as much as the P3BF in Business Winstone 99. In gaming, however, the

board wasn’t as good as the P3BF. We ran 3D Winbench99, and Intel Game

Launcher benchmarks for this. It managed a score of 675 in 3D Winbench99

compared to 1010 scored by the P3BF. In Quake III Arena, the board gave a frame

rate of 72 fps at 800x600 resolution with 16-bit color depth, which dropped to

42 fps at 1,024x768 with 32-bit color depth. The board scored 143, 127, and 150

in Dispatched, Battlezone II, and Iron Strategy respectively–the three games

of Intel Game Launcher benchmark. Overall, it didn’t perform as well as the

P3BF, but the frame rates are, nevertheless, decent for games.

The motherboard has a very comprehensive manual, and comes

with a CD containing PC-Cillin98 anti-virus, Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.06, and Asus

Probe 2.11. Considering the rich set of features, the motherboard is a good buy.