Review of Pentium II Boards with Intel's 440LX Chipset

Asus P2L97

The first two things that striked me when looking at Asus' P2L97 was the small size of the board as well as the existance only three DIMM slots on it. This board was obviously not manufactured for any high end systems but rather for 'entry level AGP systems ' (if antything like that should exist). The board comes with a softmenu like feature for adjusting the CPU parameters like bus speed and multiplier as well as with a CPU/motheboard fan/temp/voltage monitoring for use with the LDCM. The jumperless softmenu feature allows you to choose your bus speed and multiplier setting from the BIOS as known from Abit's motherboards since 1996. You can choose the bus speed from 50 (!??) up to 83 MHz so that the door is wide open for overclocking, just as in the Abit, AOpen and Chaintech LX boards. The performance of the P2L97 is not outstanding by any means. It's not slow enough to be one of the slowest, but certainly not fast enough to be in the fast league of the LX boards either. All in all I am pretty disappointed with this board from a well known manufacturer as Asus. Only 3 DIMM sockets, only two ISA slots, no great performance ... Asus has done better in the past, the last outstanding Asus board is now more than a year old.
The P2L97 is an ATX board with 3 DIMM sockets, 5 PCI, 2 ISA and one AGP slot.