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My Computer Loves This ASUS P2B-DS Motherboard

This article is dated. I purchased this motherboard in 1998 (for a little over $600 dollars at that time). I used to build a lot of computers and I did work with dual pentium pro machines at that time but this was my first home made dual system. I still own this computer as of November 2007 and it works great even now. It is amazing how fast the machine is considering the chips that are in it. I suspect strongly that amount of ram and the incredible speed of good quality high end 15K RPM SCSI drive helps a lot. Since the days of the article i swapped out the old 18GB system drive for 36GB 15K SCSI. I added few ide & usb drives and replaced some for larger to expand storage. Overall, even after this many years the machine knows how to impress.

My main home computer is running on this motherboard. With two 800 MHz CPUs overclocked to run at 900 (8x112MHz) and 1GB of RAM, it is quite happy. My system is installed on an 18GB 15000 RPM ultra wide SCSI-3 with a 60GB IDE 7200 RPM and removable IDE tray, currently occupied with 100GB 7200 RPM drive, which for a change, makes me happy. I love the speed I get with this machine and I love the motherboard.

ASUS P2B-DS Motherboard

The ASUS P2B-DS motherboard is a server class motherboard. While it supports dual Socket 1 Pentium II or Pentium III (PII or PIII) chips, it was not built for a 2 or a 1-unit rack mount case. If you want a rack, you need at least a 4U size. The P2B-DS has an onboard SCSI, an ultra wide SCSI and ultra wide SCSI-2 dual channel controller. You get 2 IDE connectors for up to 4 IDE devices and a floppy controller. This DS version has a much cheaper cousin - the P2B-D Motherboard - that lacks the Adaptec controller chipset. Two CPU slots are located relatively close to each other so do not count on being able to put in an exceptionally large CPU fan. You will be much better off with a standard size. The Adaptec AIC-7890 chipset adds few chips on the PCB so you get only four PCI slots. To ease your suffering, however, ASUS made each of the four PCIs on an independent data bus, eliminating any possibility of data collision or crosstalk. We could do without the two ISA slots, however, don't forget that when the board first came out, ISA was still rather popular. The P2B-D version of the motherboard does not have an Adaptec chipset, so the motherboard could have utilized a different PCB (printed circuit board) and could have provided 5 PCIs. Although it would be nice to have more PCI slots, it would not make sense to ruin the experience of mutually independent slots.

On this board, you get four DIMM sockets supporting up to 256 MB each with the total of 1 GB of memory. This may not seem like much but considering the motherboard is 3 years old, it is pretty good. Although the DIMM sockets are numbered, the memory bridge chipset Intel 440BX allows you to insert memory modules in any combination into any of the DIMMs. The Intel BX chipset allows for 2x AGP bus acceleration.

The Clocking And Overclocking

This motherboard was not designed for extensive overclocking work. You will not be able to set voltage for the CPUs. The memory banks and AGP are sitting on the same chip; consequently, if you change the bus frequency, you will also change the frequency of the AGP slot. This may irritate some AGP cards, for example my original Viper II did not like AGP clock of 177 MHz (4/3 of 133 MHz). Although the card supports 264 MHz bandwidth in 4x mode, which leaves plenty of breathing room, it seems the actual chip's frequency of this particular card is derived from AGP frequency and the chip must have been trying to run at 354 MHz. This is unfortunate because when you try to overclock, you have to use either a low-end AGP or a PCI card. The bus frequencies supported on my motherboard are 66MHz, 75MHz, 83MHz, 100MHz, 103MHz, 112MHz and 133MHz. The multipliers are 2x through 8x with increments of 1/2. Of course my CPUs are locked at 8x which renders setting it anything else pointless. I chose 8x100 CPUs so I can overclock them. CPUs running on 133 MHz cannot be overclocked on this motherboard because the bus frequency cannot be set at anything higher.

The OS Requirements

As with any dual motherboard, if you install Windows 95, 98 or ME, you cannot use more than one CPU. The second CPU, when installed, will not be utilized, as the OS does not support SMP (symmetric multi processing.) Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 or XP Professional do support SMP. If you plan on installing only one CPU, you will need to have a blank in the second slot (ASUS C-P2T PC100 CPU Termination Card revision 1.02 or later.) The board will provide ample speed improvement on the same frequency compared to cheaper motherboards even with one processor.

CPU Support

You can install either Pentium II or Pentium III on the motherboard with a maximum speed of 8x 133MHz, which would be the 1.06 GHz chip. The motherboard will support Coppermine chips with BIOS update. In other words, this is a motherboard that will serve well in a file or a web server, but will not deliver the punch of quad or eight way PIII, nor will it come close to even a single Pentium 4 (P4) with respect to speed.

Final Thoughts

There will come a wonderful day when I bring home a new motherboard. It will be either a quad Athlon (once AMD pulls it all together) or dual P4 Xeon motherboard. I'm more inclined to buy P4 Xeon, because the hyper threading technology just makes me all excited about the endless possibilities. But that will have to wait for another article.