Asus P3B-F i440BX Motherboard Review

For the last couple of years, the industry has been seen supporting a chipset like no other. Back in mid-1998, Intel had introduced their i440BX chipset which was the designated chipset for their Pentium II line of processors. Naturally, every mainboard manufacturer wholeheartedly accepted the chipset as at the time, as there were not any other chipsets on the market that could provide the support and stability as well as the 440BX did. When the Pentium II arrived in the marketplace, it was the first offering by Intel which supported a 100MHz FSB. Intel's attempt at providing a CPU which had officially broken the 66-MHz FSB bottleneck was received with a mixed response (in terms of performance benefits).

However, being as large and as popular Intel was back at the time (and more or less still is today), the progress of their Pentium II and 440BX chipset into the market went pretty much uninhibited. It turns out that the 440BX chipset was (and is) one of the more stable and higher-performing chipsets out there. Following closely, VIA introduced their flavour of the "BX" chipset. Though boards based upon VIA's goods were more cost-effective than their Intel counterparts, performance (rather lack of) was a big issue and shunned away quite a number of people, who in fact, were looking for a good Intel alternative.

It is quite astonishing to note that in an industry where technology changes in a blink of an eye, manufacturers such as Asus and ABit still churn out motherboards whose heart is the 440BX.

With current chipsets available such as Intel's own 810, 820, 840 and VIA's much popular VIA Apollo Pro 133A, why is the BX still a favorite among select consumers? In this review, we will tackle this question by giving a performance comparison of 3 chipsets. Namely the Intel 810, VIA's Apollo Pro 133A and of course, the Intel 440BX. Of course, we will be looking at the major focus of this article, the Asus P3B-F in depth as well.

Asus a well known name in the hardware community builds its reputation on high performing, stable and in most cases, extremely flexible (and I don't mean physically) motherboards. So does their BX offering fair against the competition? Read on to find out more...

Specifications

- Slot 1 interface for SECC2 / SECC / SEPP processors
- "Coppermine" support for Slot 1 or for FC-PGA through a "Slocket" adapter
- Support for speeds in excess of 700MHz
- 66 / 75/ 83 / 100 / 103 / 105 / 110 / 112 / 115 / 120 / 124 / 133 / 140 / 150 MHz FSB speeds
- Multiplier ratio in the range of 2.0x - 8.0x in 0.5x increments
- JumperFree BIOS with an option to use on-board DIP switches
- 4 DIMM slots for support of up to 1024MB of memory
- Ultra ATA/33 support
- 6 Bus Mastering PCI (v2.2) / 1 ISA / 1 AGP slot(s) (varies by territory)
- System Voltage Monitoring (integrated in ASUS ASIC)
- ATX form factor
- Onboard power LED

What's Included

Packaged in with the box is the Asus P3B-F mainboard, a manual which provided comprehensive documentation, a universal retention mechanism with integrated retainer pins, a pair of ribbon cables for the hard disk and floppy drives, bag of four spare jumpers and a driver CD.