ASUS P2
Mainboard
ASUS Mainboard P2L97 with AGP
I was shopping for a new mainboard recently and the ASUS board had already been released, so I ordered the board with a PII chip and decided to make the big switch! Truth is, I hate these changes, but I needed the second system and with some very cool new sims in the offing this seemed as good a time as any!
Obviously buying a new main board these days means the LX chipset with AGP support and SDRam. I wasn't convinced that UDMA would be all that amazing, but it didn't hurt that it too was supported. The board arrived swiftly and I have to admit, its one of the nicest LOOKING mainboards I've ever seen.
In case you don't know, AGP is a connector specification, a new video standard and a new way of handling graphics on your computer's bus. Its 133MHz speed represents a large increase over the current 33MHz PCI standard. Initially, it will be offered only on computers that use one of the new Intel Pentium II processors. However, AMD is committed to support also and we should see boards mounting the K6 with AGP very soon now. At the moment AGP isn't that significant, but under WIN98 or the new NT and when software is written to take advantage of it, it will be a drastic improvement over the present video and memory situation.
These new boards also support SDRam and Ultra DMA. SD Ram is considerably faster than EDO ram. The performance gain is most noticed on high end systems, but will be even more significant with an AGP based system. When your video card has direct access to system ram , you want that memory to be as fast as possible. EDO ram does not have sufficient bandwidth and would bottleneck in an AGP system.
As for Ultra DMA, I was surprised to discover that it seems as fast as SCSI III! Since the cost is CONSIDERABLY less this is GOOD NEWS! When the system first booted up with the new Fujitsu UDMA drive I was amazed at the speed at which my programs were loading. My comparison system was an AMD233 with Seagate Cheetah 4 gig under SCSI III.
New hard drives supporting the standard have been available for months, and the overall impact on a fast system will be worth the investment. It is commonly recognized that there is little point in having a very fast cpu unless other parts of your system can keep pace. The great thing about these new drives is they cost no more than the old DMA drives for the same capacity! Now on to the board and installation.
As I said, its a nice looking board and quite small. The design is jumperless and will run up to 333 MHz (the oem version is cheaper and uses jumpers). Jumperless simply means that all the settings you need to make can be done via the bios software and you don't need to remove the case and look for tiny black sliders to place over microscopic pins.
Putting together the heat sink fan assembly of the PII chip is a bit of an experience. The entire module measures about 6 inches by 1.5 inches by 2 inches.. large! But access to connectors and memory is very good. I installed my board in a new style case that allows me to remove one side at a time or slide the entire main board with expansion cards in place out the back. Nice!
After installing the cpu module I bolted the case into the box and began making all the connections. I installed the UDMA Fujitsu and with a boot disk got ready for WIN95 install from the Toshiba 24x CD. It went fine. The board recognized the drive immediately as well as my ZIP drive. However, WIN95 is not all knowing about these newer chipsets, and this is why ASUS includes a CD with a patch and utilities for WIN95. In fact WIN95 interprets some factors having to do with IDE incorrectly until you run the patch.
I had a chance to run a couple of simulation betas at this point. I went into the bios and went to MANUAL on the CPU Internal Core Speed. This allowed me to set the system bus at 75MHz (you can also choose 83) and clock to 4x, giving me a 300MHz cpu clock. Speed was noticeably up from my AMD 233 with corresponding reduction in load time and increase in frame rates. The board would not load WIN95 when set to 83MHz which could be a memory weakness (Toshiba in this case).
However, its at this point that I have a complaint. There is no documentation with the CD and even the mainboard manual doesn't tell you when to run the software. There are README files on the CD but even a one page explanation on real paper of what to do with the CD would be nice!
After the system seemed stable I ran the patch update from the CD. Everything seemed fine and so I prepared for the next stage, which was swapping my existing SCSI III setup into the new box.
I removed the UDMA drive and installed my DTP controller with the Seagate Cheetah hard drive. Boot up went fine, with WIN95 on the imported drive recognizing new features and loading drivers. For some reason the process was VERY slow. My ZIP drive was not recognized. I ran the patch and then checked the Device/System tab in Control Panel and noticed that there was a question mark beside the IDE controller. Hmmm... thats why my ZIP drive was not being found.
I had an IRQ conflict, as it turns out, so after doing some tuning the main IDE controller was recognized, but there were question marks beside the two IDE channels. I played with settings for a while, and then decided to run the patch uninstall. That was my big mistake. WIN95 crashed badly. In fact, it wouldn't boot in normal mode and in Safe mode none of the icons appeared and a key press or mouse press had no effect. Fear gripped my heart! Luckily I had done a tape backup of critical data the day before, but this was NOT GOOD!
After kicking my cat and yelling at my wife I felt a little better and probably would not have murdered an ASUS technician if they appeared, though a little torture would have been enjoyable....! The eventual outcome is that I have a nice box on my work table and an expensive chipset properly installed. My Fujitsu hard drive, while properly detecting, seemed to not be working. Whether the mainboard itself has suffered was an unknown for a couple of days...
I emailed ASUS technical support around 3 PM on Tuesday. I had a fairly quick but not very helpful response, and then I phoned the boards vendor tech support (Megatrends). They suggested that the bios was likely damaged, so I downloaded an update from the ASUS website and flashed the bios. Still the board would no longer detect the drive (I had already fdisked the drive and reinstalled WIN95 on my second machine). It was obvious at this point that the onboard IDE controller had failed and I was given an RMA number.... ah... sh$@#%%! The continuing story will be posted eventually...
The moral of the story? I'm still not exactly sure what went wrong, but I have a feelling that less than a new WIN95 install is risky. It would be nice to know exactly when to install the patch. And should one also run the buster master utility or not? I did and it made no difference to the IDE channel problem. And is there a conflict between the on board SCSI bios (even when disabled) and the DTP controller? Who knows...
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Last Updated August 30th, 1997