The P5S-B motherboard supports a 5-volt programmable 2-Mbit Flash ROM chip. Among the various options which are provided as standard and as seen on just about every other mainboard on the market are a few neat parameters that you can play with to optimize overall system performance. In the Chipset Features Setup, there are number of available options to configure the speed, timing, etc. of system memory, such as SDRAM Configuration. The default setting is By SPD (or Serial Presence Detect). This 8-pin EEPROM device stores critical parameter information about the memory module such as memory type, size, speed, voltage interface and module banks.

My experience has been just to leave it on the default setting. Options such as SDRAM CAS Latency controls the time between SDRAM read commands and the time that the data actually becomes available. You may have seen in the past around other websites the great debate about the effectiveness about CAS latency and its part in boosting system performance. By what we have seen already, most PC100 SDRAM modules allow for a latency of 2 cycles as opposed to 3.

Before actually operating your new P5S-B board, you must first adjust the amount of shared system memory to be used for your graphics display. You have an option of either 2, 4 or 8MB to be used as graphics memory. As this particular board used in testing does not boast of a separate display cache, I really didn't have much of a choice here.

As with the rest of the boards supporting hardware monitoring, 4 voltage, namely Vcore, 3.3V, 5V and 12V are displayed under the Power Management Setup option in the BIOS menu. In addition, chassis fan speed, CPU fan speed/temperature values are given as well. You have the option of disabling the monitoring for each item. Handy, if you are a daredevil overclocker with utter disrespect normal operating limits and really don't want that nagging computer system telling you to turn the voltage down or telling you that the CPU is going to fry if you don't wise up. Other than that, there really isn't much to do since all voltage, clock and FSB settings are taken care of by the 2 DIP switch boxes. The DIP switches do get the job done, but I am sure that everyone prefers the BIOS route. No manual AGP divider ratio is available.

Power Management

The Asus P5S-B comes up to the mark in terms of power management and doesn't lack anything when compared to other boards. Wake On-LAN allows you to remotely power up your system through your network by sending a wake-up frame or signal. With this feature, you can remotely upload/download data to/from systems during off peak hours. AC PWR Loss Restart is what we all know as having unattended power up of system which has been turned off after a power failure. You can also have your computer boot up unattended at a specified time of day in a week by utilizing the Automatic Power Up option enabled. Basically, nothing has been left out on the P5S-B.