BX Flagship: Asus CUBX — THG.RU

Introduction

Intel plans to release the i815 Solano chipset in two weeks. This chipset will come with Intel’s hub architecture supporting 133 MHz FSB, UltraDMA/66, AGP 4x and real 133 MHz SDRAM support. On the basis of the 440BX benchmark results, this seems to be very promising.

Even though this new chipset is almost here, some motherboards companies still announce new BX motherboards. As you could read in Tom’s Showdown At 133 MHz Part 2, a BX system clocked at 133 MHz FSB provides even better performance than Intel’s workstation motherboard OR840, which makes use of dual channel RDRAM. Nevertheless, the BX will be old fashioned pretty soon.

So why does Asus release a new, excellent featured motherboard based on a two years old chipset? We wanted to know what’s behind it.

Why BX?

As already said, Intel’s BX chipset is over two years old. Normally, computer components are out-dated within only some months, so why do so many people think that BX still is the one and only chipset?

• Intel chipsets using SDRAM (440LX and BX) can stand any competition, as VIA, SiS or ALi chipsets had never been faster. Moreover, SDRAM is approved and cheap
• BX is able to run 133 MHz absolutely stable. The only thing which you have to make sure is that your graphics card can cope with 89 MHz AGP clock speed.
• BX does even run at 150 MHz FSB, even it is only specified for 100 MHz
• BX only supports AGP 2x. Nevertheless, there has been no real need for AGP 4x so far. As long as the main memory’s bandwidth remains at 800 MByte/s, AGP 4x will never be able to show its full potential
• The BX chipset has been revised several times, today it is probably the most mature, stable, reliable and fast chipset available for Pentium II/III and Celeron processors.
• The BX chipset is fully supported by all operating systems available.

The Asus CUBX

This time, Asus went a new way when naming their new BX motherboard. It’s not called P4B or something like that, but comes with the cool title CUBX. Sounds like ‘see you, BX!’.

Asus keeps up with the trend and equips their CUBX with a Socket 370. Thus the board can get along both with the Celeron and the Pentium III FC-PGA. Intel recently started to ship the Pentium III 933, so the only version which is merely available as Slot-1 version is the 1 GHz model.

The board comes with six PCI slots (rev. 2.2), which all can be masters. Four DIMM sockets are provided, capable of hosting up to 1 GByte RAM. Of course you may also use ECC memory. An on board LED will light up as soon as you apply power to the board.

Asus provides a jumper which lets you chose between soft setup or the DIP switches. All CPU settings can be done in both modes, just the enhanced overclocking options (vcore alteration) can only be done within the BIOS. Here you can chose between the following FSB speeds: 66, 75, 83, 100, 103, 105, 110, 112, 115, 120, 124, 133, 140 and 150 MHz. Of course you may also increase the CPU voltage. Valid settings are 1.65, 1.7, 1.75, 1.8, 1.85, 1.9 and 1.95V. The BIOS is also able to detect a failed overclocking attempt and restores the clock speed defaults; pushing the reset button is enough.

The Asus CUBX, Continued

As you know, the BX chipset itself does not support UltraDMA/66. Even so, Asus integrated an additional UltraDMA/66 IDE controller chip from CMD, adding two IDE channels. Thanks to this, the CUBX comes with a total of four IDE ports (allowing up to eight drives). Of course this UDMA/66 chip can be disabled in the BIOS, as it is a bit sensitive. At 37.5 MHz PCI-clock, which you get when running the FSB at 150 MHz, the little chip didn’t want to work any more. I got no problems at 133 MHz FSB (=33 MHz PCI clock). I recommend to be careful with timing sensitive devices like controller chips. They usually dislike being overclocked and the worst that can happen is unnoticed data corruption.

The CUBX has no less than five USB ports. As always, the first two are situated between the I/O ports and the keyboard and mouse connectors. Many other boards feature four USB ports as well, but only few come with the right adapter or cable to use them. Asus includes everything that is necessary.

I think that there’s hardly any need to talk about Asus’ manuals. They are always very comprehensive and detailed. This one comes with a thorough BIOS description, which should make the setup quite painless. Asus did not the best work regarding the board’s design as the floppy connector has been placed before the first two PCI slots. That makes the floppy cable having to run across the AGP card, which inhibits proper cooling of this card.

The CUBX provides three fan headers and the usual wake on LAN or wake on modem features. The connector block has been labeled appropriate, but still there’s some space for improvements. Let’s now take a quick look at the benchmark results.

Test Setup

Some of you probably know my test setting inside out.

I could have also used a GeForce DDR card, but I kept my Asus V6600. Thus you will be able to compare the benchmark results with the Slot-1 motherboard review. If you only want to get performance numbers, it’s easier to take a look at the last update.

Office Applications Benchmark

Both in Windows 98 SE and Windows NT, the CUBX is clearly faster than its colleagues using the VIA Apollo Pro 133A.

Game Benchmark

Expendable is able to benefit more from the fast BX motherboard. Yet both VIA 694X based motherboards are clearly slower.

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.