Asus P4BGL-MX Motherboard

The motherboard is based on the Intel 845GL chipset and has a 400 MHz FSB and supports DDR 266 SDRAM with a maximum of 2GB.Other features include On-board Intel Extreme Graphics, 3 PCI slots, LAN, USB ports and On-board RealTek 2-channel sound codec. The board also supports over clocking of the system bus through the BIOS. With it you can over clock the Quad pumped 100 MHz bus to 105 MHz bringing the total FSB frequency to 420 MHz. In addition, it also lets you run the FSB at 533 MHz, which incidentally can also be over-clocked to 556 MHz.

We tested the motherboard with a P4 2.2 GHz, 256 MB DDR 266 RAM and 7200 RPM HDD and compared it against the Gigabyte GA-8IGML and Mora 845GL MUT motherboards that we reviewed earlier in February and May respectively.

S N   A   P   S   H O   T Price : Rs 3,800 (three-year warranty) Key specs : good performance at low price Contact : Asus India, Mumbai, E-mail : info_india@asus.com

The board performed better than the Mora board in all benchmarks, but lagged behind the Gigabyte in Business and Content Creation tests. The board gave extremely good performance in Quake III, considering its on-board graphics. We also over clocked the processor to 2.31 GHz by increasing the system bus frequency and got even better graphics performance. It also managed to beat the Gigabyte in Content Creation Winstone after over clocking.

Overall, the board is a good performer and comes at a very low price.

Anoop Mangla