Layout:

Asus seems to always have a good layout.  The CPU fan header is not placed too close to anything that will prevent you from connecting a fan to it easily.  The onboard audio connectors are placed in a straight line (stacked), the IDE and floppy ports are placed in a straight line also(stacked).  There are some 'problems' with their layout though, first of all, the placement of the DIMM sockets make it hard to enable "Cyrix" compatibility (which might not be such a bad thing *smirk*.)  The DIMM sockets are placed too close to the AGP slot, therefore you will most likely have to remove your videocard if you are swapping RAM. 

The placement of the ATX connector looks good on the motherboard, but it is really not that great, because of the way powersupplies are designed, the ATX cable from the powersupply will probably interfere with the CPU fan.  Finally the tiny little green heatsink rears its ugly head again.  However with the clip on design, you can remove it, and place a little dab of thermal paste on top of the NorthBridge BGA chip, and re-attach the whole thing, my question is why doesn't Asus do it for us? 

Bundled Software:

Auto Run Software Install Utility (which basically allows you to install the following:) VIA 4 in 1 Driver, Asus PC Probe Hardware monitoring Utility, and Trend - PC-Cillin for protecting your computer from viruses.  I personally prefer the Norton Suite that other motherboard makers are bundling, but alas, PC-Cillin is better than nothing.

Overclocking:

You can overclock with the dipswitches on the motherboard, or go to the BIOS, and select your FSB, Clock multiplier (useless unless you have an engineering sample CPU,) and core voltage within the Advanced menu.  FSB's are available at 66, 68, 75, 80, 83, 100, 103, 105, 112, 115, 120, 124, 133, 140, 145, and 150Mhz. Again we see the speed limit of 150Mhz FSB being held to... I wish Asus would follow suite with that of Abit and produce a board with Front Side Bus of 200Mhz. But, I guess you can't have everthing you want all the time...

I used a cB0 stepping PIII-650 FCPGA OEM processor for testing with a cheap "AVC" FCPGA heatsink and fan.  A stick of Hyundai CAS-3 PC133 memory was also used as.  Using the Advanced menu in the BIOS, I set the core voltage to 1.7V (the same as the 'official' PIII-933) and set the frontside bus to 145Mhz.

Now, how about some of those ever so cool benchmarks of a PIII 948Mhz chip!!