Asus P2B-DS

Asus P2B (News flash! P3B-F info here) series motherboard is one of the most famous motherboard in the market. P2B series motherboard is based on Intel's 440BX chipset design. P2B comes with many favours, for example, P2B-D is Dual Slot 1 board, P2B-L comes with onboard LAN adapter. P2B-DS is a Dual Slot 1 motherboard with onboard Adaptec AIC 7890 & 3860 Ultra2 Wide SCSI controller and it supports up to 15 devices and 80MB/s transfer rate. One component worth mentioning about this motherboard is that, in all our samples, only this board seems to have memory buffer chip installed on the motherboard. while also noticing on the motherboard, is seems like Asus might have a plan to support Adaptec's RAIDport III connector on one of the PCI slot. (What uses RAIDport III connector? Check out Adaptec's ARO-1130U2 Ultra2 RAID CARD.)

This motherboard comes with all standard features like 2X (133MHz sideband) AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port), Four 168-pin DIMM supports up to 1GB of PC100 SDRAM, WOL (Wake On LAN) connector, Dual UDMA/33 ports etc.

One thing that we are kind of disappointed is in the CMOS screen the hardware monitor looks like a single CPU system, only ONE CPU Fan speed and no CPU temperature (the sensor is optional item!) is detected. Unfortunately, this is a loaner unit and we do not have enough time to check out the board in details. By using MBM (Motherboard Monitor), it may have a possibility for the hardware chip to monitor CPU temperature of both CPU, CPU Fan speeds, various supply voltages. The hardware monitor chip used on the P2B-DS we tested is Winbond's W83781D (thanks Cherry for the fix-up version of PDF file). W83781D can monitor 3 thermal inputs from remote sensors and it is possible to generate hardware interrupt to activate system protection. This chip also has ISA and I²C serial bus interface build in and it is Intel LDCM compatible. W83781D is a idle solution for single chip hardware monitor.

Like all P2B series motherboard, CPU Core Frequency Multipler and Bus Frequency selection are done via jumper setting. Personally I like jumper setting better than soft menu, atleast you can sure what frequency your CPU is running (see Tyan Tiger 100 review), and if it doesn't boot, it is less painful to restore the settings.

We have tested this board with a pair of PPGA Celeron 366MHz Processors on MSI 6905 Ver 1.1 slockets. With BIOS Ver.1008B, P2B-DS detected 2 Celeron Processors correctly at 66MHz, 75MHz and 83MHz FSB. But with 100MHz even at 2.4V VCC_CORE it only pass POST (Power On Self Test) but no luck in starting NT Loader.

As I said ealier, this is a loaner machine, it was orginally config for dual 450MHz Pentium II Processors. So why not take a joy ride and see how far it can go? With 2.0V VCC_CORE, we are were able to push it all the way up to 112MHz FSB without any problems.

For higher FSB we think it is possible via some undocumented jumper setting or using SoftFSB, but due to limited time, we do not have any opportunity to expore this motherboard futher.

Afterall, Asus P2B-DS motherboard is a pretty solid, reliable and has a very good track record motherboard, if you have extra cash laying around, this is the motherboard you want to buy. This motherboard you will most likely find it in a company's server rather than someone's desk....

Board Revsion:	1.04
BIOS Version:	1008B
Number of DIMM Slot:	4
2X AGP Slot:	Yes
UDMA/66 interface onboard:	No
SCSI on Board:	Yes
Number of ISA Slot:	2
Number of PCI Slot:	4
Number of share ISA/PCI slot:	0
68.5MHz Turbo Frequency:	No

Overall Score: 75

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