Installation

As usual for any other board. Screw everything into the cabinet, connect all the power, HDD, etc. cables in the board, switch it on and you are ready to go. Go where? You have to install the drivers first. Specifically, the audio and VGA drivers. There is something on the CD called Asus PC probe (Hey! Watch where you stick that thing!) which is used for the hardware monitoring process. This of course, is pretty much optional. Unless you are on the verge of killing your CPU while overclocking or need to find out how hot the CPU gets before your finger burns, you probably won't need it.

The Chipset

The SiS 530/5595 is just one of the Super 7 chipsets along with ALI's Aladdin V and VIA's MVP3 that are available on the market. You will see the SiS chipset on alot of low cost motherboard solutions out there. SiS' 530 (North Bridge) integrates the Host-to-PCI bridge, the PCI interface, the L2 cache controller, the DRAM controller, the hardware 2D/3D VGA controller and the PCI IDE controller. The host interface supports Synchronous/Asynchronous Host/DRAM clocking configuration which certainly adds to flexibility in case of compatibility/stability issues that may arise.

The L2 cache controller can support up to 2 MB PB SRAM though only 512KB is present on this P5S-B for testing, an option of 1024KB PB SRAM is there. The DRAM controller can support SDRAM memory up to 1.5 GBytes with three double sided SDRAM DIMM's configuration. The cacheable DRAM sizes support up to 256 Mbytes.

The built in PCI IDE controller supports the ATA PIO/DMA, and the Ultra DMA33/66 function that support the data transfer rate up to 66 MB/s. It provides the separate data path for two IDE channels that can eminently improve the performance under the multi tasking environment. The AGP internal interface is supported for integrated H/W 3D VGA controller. It certainly isn't very good but it does get the job done if you are just looking at Microsoft Word.

In addition, the integrated 3D graphics controller utilizes a 100MHz bus. In order to keep it cost effective (in other words, low performing), the SiS530 has an option to utilize (read as share) up to 8MB of main system memory. A digital flat panel port is provided on the P5S-B (support courtesy of the chipset) in order to connect a flat panel monitor for display without the need for any analog-to-digital conversion. Lastly, the integrated 3D controller supports hardware DVD acceleration to improve DVD playback performance.

The SiS5595 (South Bridge) integrates the PCI-to-ISA bridge with the PC/PCI DMA and Serial IRQ capability, the ACPI/Legacy PMU, the Data Acquisition Interface, the Universal Serial Bus host/hub interface, and the ISA bus interface which contains the ISA bus controller, the DMA controllers, the interrupt controllers, the Timers and the Real Time Clock (RTC). It also integrates the Keyboard Controller and PS/2 mouse interface that can support keyboard power on function for users to power on system by entering the hot key or password from keyboard.

In addition, SiS5595 South Bridge also meets the ACPI 1.0 specification for Windows 98 environment, it can support power-management timer, power button, real time clock alarm wake up, more sleeping state, ACPI LED for sleeping and working state, LAN wake up, modem ring in wake up, and OnNow. The SiS5595 also includes an in built hardware monitoring feature which allows to you monitor temperatures and various system voltages.