Economical Motherboard for Offices

The TUSI-M from Asus is a low-cost motherboard meant for business environments. The motherboard uses SiS’s 630E chipset with onboard audio and video. Thanks to its micro-ATX form factor, the board takes up very little room and can be easily accommodated in most cabinets. The board has 3 PCI slots and 1 AMR slot, which should be enough for most office work. There is no AGP port, but the on-board video does a decent job unless you start using 3D applications. One final impressive feature is the presence of an Ethernet port on the motherboard, thus ensuring that it plugs into your office network with little effort. Other useful features are: support for PC133 memory, 5 USB ports and hardware monitoring.

On the performance front, the motherboard gave acceptable results in all benchmarks, except those in 3D. Since the board is geared towards office productivity, the first benchmark we ran was Business Winstone 2001, which simulates a working environment by running applications like Word, Excel and IE concurrently. Here it managed a decent score of 26.1. The other benchmark, Content Creation Winstone 2001, that simulates a much higher workload with several high-end apps like Adobe PhotoShop, Director and DreamWeaver gave a score of 26.2, which is average. The onboard video can handle some very basic 3D work, as shown by a frame rate of 26.4 in QuakeIII Arena at 640x480x16 resolution.

Overall, a good motherboard that is targeted at office productivity. The onboard LAN is a major plus point, but it offers few expandability options with its small form factor and 3 PCI slots. At Rs 5,500, it’s a decent buy.

Anuj Jain at PCQ Labs