BX Flagship: Asus CUBX

What About Comparing The CUBX With Other BX Motherboards?

You may be surprised to hear that we are doing another BX motherboard review right now, so please stay tuned. I did not want to include other results as long as the tests have not been finished. For all who want to know: The CUBX seems to be one of the fastest BX motherboards once again.

Conclusion

Asus' CUBX is certainly all but a normal motherboard, that's why I wanted to do this quick review. It's one of the last products based on a chipset which has certainly been the most successful Intel chipset of all times, as they are not very lucky with their i8xx generation. The board crashed once when I was trying to enter the BIOS, whereas I did not face problems during any benchmark run. I spent almost two hours trying around with the BIOS settings just to find out the reason for this crash, but I came to no conclusion. For the final BX motherboard review I'm going to re-test the CUBX using the latest BIOS 1006 Beta.

Adding together all features of the CUBX shows that Asus raises the claim to have one of the best BX motherboards ever. Two things could have been better though. I am still not quite sure about the origin of the one crash I encountered, but that may be nothing. However, I have to moan a bit about the PLL-chip used on the board. It does not offer 1 MHz increments of the FSB as typically found on Abit products, which can be a rather important feature for overclockers, particularly if you try and overclock Celeron processors with high mulitpliers. Six PCI and one ISA slot is the maximum, I don't think that there's any motherboard with seven slots. I also doubt that many people are going to equip all four DIMM sockets.

The board ran stable up to 150 MHz and also allows you to use the cheap Celeron processors, which have been announced up to 700 MHz now. Regarding features, performance and overclocking, Asus provides an excellent motherboard once again. What a pity that BX can't stay forever.

If you are an overclocker or computer freak, than you should have a good look at the CUBX, as it might serve as reliable basis for quite a long time.