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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Street Walker who wrote (937)	5/31/1998 9:53:00 PM
From: Dave Hanson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Asus P2B; P2B-L (my personal top choice), Tom's hardware site I'm planning on picking up the P2B-L version this board in my next system. It comes with a built in Intel fast-ethernet NIC, and costs only about $40-50 more than the P2B. Tom's recommendation that SW sites reads in part as follows: "Asus' P2B made the top of my recommendation's list due to a good combination of very good compatibility, a decent list of features and very good performance. The board could be even better if the CPU settings could be adjusted from the BIOS setup menu or at least via dip switches. Jumpers are really getting out of fashion, even Intel uses a software approach. The P2B is unfortunately equipped with only 3 DIMM sockets, which is the other critique I have. I recommend the P2B as a well performing 'low trouble' solution." My comments on this: -Jumpers for speed/voltage settings are no big deal unless you like to tweak with overclocking settings frequently. Asus used to use a bios function in an earlier version of the board, but reliability problems led them to drop it. -Many others have echoed Tom in his praise of the reliability of the Asus boards relative to competitors. For traders (as opposed to hobbiests or gamers), reliabilty should be _the_ paramount concern, IMHO. -The P2B-L version of the board has 4, not 3 DIMM sockets, and keeps the same number of PCI slots (4 total, with one shared) that the P2B has. This gives networkers an extra slot over the P2B. (Also, if I recall correctly the P2B can access a whole Gig of SDRAM.) -The bios in Asus boards supports NCR based SCSI controllers (very cheap and reliable) directly. I picked up a fast and very good NCR 810 based SCSI board for about $35 recently, and this ASUS bios will let me boot from it hassle free. Other comments welcome. I probably won't be buying for a couple of weeks/months yet.