Asus CUV4X-M
Board Revision: 1.1
BIOS Version: 1002 (March 16, 2000)
The CUV4X-M is a MicroATX model. Actually it's out of competition, as you shouldn't compare it to standard ATX motherboards. But as Asus was winning one recommendation after the other, I wanted to see how a low end product would perform compared to other motherboards which are situated one level higher.
Due to the small MicroATX size, the little Asus board comes with only two PCI slots and the AMR. That's not really much if you want to use lots of multimedia expansion cards. Asus included the standard three DIMM sockets, while two would have been enough for a MicroATX motherboard. I also don't really understand why it comes with an AGP Pro slot, as hardly anybody will plug in a high edn graphics card into a low end motherboard.
Everything else can compete with the others: Four USB ports, UltraDMA/66, BIOS soft setup, AC97 sound with three audio headers, Wake on LAN and on Modem, three fan headers, ECC support for up to 1.5 GBytes SDRAM, FSB speeds up to 150 MHz and the option to change the processor voltage.
As you can imagine, the Asus manual is as good as ever. It's comprehensive, detailed and easy to understand. I was quite amused after reading that they still call the L2 cache of Coppermine a pipelined burst cache... ;-)
There's nothing new from the benchmark front. Asus did excellent work once again, but this time another candidate is slightly faster, putting the CUV4X-M in second place. Nevertheless, you will get a very fast, reliable and great-featured motherboard from Asus once again - even if this MicroATX model won't be a good choice for most people.
