Asus CUV4X Motherboard

Like the CUBX motherboard, this one can also house either a

PIII or a Celeron processor in its FCPGA slot. It uses the VIA Apollo Pro133Z

chipset and has support for 133 MHz FSB in addition to 66 and 100 MHz. So, you

can put PC-100 or PC-133 compliant SDRAM. It can also support the fastest SDRAM

available, known as HSDRAM (High speed DRAM). It supports a maximum of 1.5 GB of

RAM in its three DIMM slots.

PCI

slots remain at an ample five, along with one ISA and an AMR slot. The

motherboard also has support for the new 4x AGP cards. The model we received for

review had audio onboard, although without audio is also available. Installing

the board is hassle-free, with all the ports being color-coded. The manual is

also very comprehensive.

We used the same set of specs to test the CUV4X as for the

CUBX–PIII/700 MHz and Celeron 500 MHz processors, 64 MB SDRAM, and a Creative

GeForce AGP card with 32 MB VRAM. We also ran the same set of benchmarks–Business

Winstone99 for productivity applications, 3DWinbench99 for graphics performance,

and Quake III Arena and Intel Game Launcher for gaming performance. The CUV4X

was slightly lower than the CUBX in Business Winstone99–at 20.2 with a Celeron

and 25.3 with a PIII CPU. However, in graphics performance, the board actually

gave much lower scores than the CUBX motherboard. This was 617 for the Celeron

and 910 PIII in 3D Winbench99. Similarly, Quake III Arena gave 39-35 fps with

Celeron and 60-42 fps with the PIII. IGL gave scores of 91, 125, and 92 with the

Celeron and 218, 338, and 162 with a PIII in the three games. All these were

lower than the corresponding scores of the CUBX.

For a board that’s more feature-rich than the CUBX, this

large difference came as a shocking surprise. After lots of research and hunting

around, we came across a similar issue with another VIA chipset motherboard–the

Asus P3V4X. There, when the drivers for the chipset were upgraded, the

motherboard’s performance dropped considerably. Feeling that this might be the

case with our motherboard too, we changed its drivers to an older version–from

the current VIA 4-in-1 drivers version 4.2 to the 4.17 version. Unfortunately,

these drivers are not available on the Asus or VIA Websites. Luckily, we had a

P3V4X motherboard that had come for review (see page 184 in this issue), and the

older drivers were available with it.

The motherboard’s performance soared with the older

drivers. With the PIII, in Quake III at 600x800 resolution and 16-bit color

depth, we were able to get frame rates of 81 fps as compared to the earlier 60

fps. In IGL, the scores improved to 264, 352, 162 as compared to a previous 218,

338, 210 for Dispatched, Iron Strategy and Battlezone II respectively.

These numbers are still less compared to the CUBX, but are

nevertheless pretty good. And considering that it costs less than the CUBX, and

supports 133 MHz FSB as well, it’s a good buy. You will, however, need the

older VIA chipset drivers to see it in action, so check with your vendor for

them.

The motherboard comes bundled with Asus PC Probe 2.11,

PC-Cillin98 anti-virus software, audio drivers, Yamaha XG Studio, and Adobe

Acrobat Reader 4.