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Asus have always been one of the more respected names in the world of PC hardware. Their motherboards have always been regarded as being very well built and stable. Thus in the summer of 1998 Asus entered into the newly formed marketplace for Super Socket 7 motherboards with their ALi Aladdin 5 based design, the P5A. Now a year on from its launch the Asus P5A is still one of the more popular Super Socket 7 motherboards on the market. Super 7 boards havn't fared too well in over a year of running, but, the latest revisions have brought a level of compatibility and stability that was absent from Super 7 boards for so long. We now turn our attention to the P5A, as it was chosen as a replacement board for the system that suffered at the hands of the woeful TMC Ti5vgf that we recently tested. So, to see how it fared read on. Asus P5A, the featuresWhen comparing the Asus P5A to some of the more recent Super 7 motherboards (and Slot 1) we have seen, it feature set seems rather limited. As befitting a price tag of £68, the P5A we tested was only equipped with 512 Kb of level 2 cache. This may seem miserly when compared to some of the more recent boards which can be equipped with up to as much as 2 Mb of level 2 cache. This though we didn't worry unduly about as the majority of ALi Aladdin 5 based boards seem to be equipped with only 512 Kb, and even 1 Mb seems slightly extravagant for boards with this chipset. The P5A follows the popular format of 5 PCI, 2 ISA and 1 AGP slots, which has been a popular motherboard design for the past year. The inclusion of the 2 legacy ISA slots will please many users who may wish to use pre-PCI sound cards such as the Sound Blaster Awe 64 Value. The inclusion of 5 PCI slots also gives users plenty of expansion space with PCI peripherals, so expansion will not be a problem. Processor support with the P5A includes at present all AMD K6 chips up to the K6 III 450. It also seems likely that the K6 III 500 will run in this board as clock multipliers go all the way up to 5.5x, meaning that a potential 550 MHz can be attained, if AMD ever release a K6 III this fast. The P5A also supports all Intel Pentium processors from 90 to 233 MHz and all current Cyrix designs. Up to 768 Mb of main system memory can be fitted into 3 DIMM sockets. The Aladdin 5 chipset supports PC-100 DIMM sizes of 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 & 256 Megabytes. This compares favourably with many VIA MVP3 based motherboards, which encounter a number of problems preventing the fitting of 256 Mb DIMMs. This though is not a worry, as anything more than 128 Mb in a Super Socket 7 system is excessive. The chipset supports U/DMA 33 Hard Drives, on 2 IDE channels. There is also hardware monitoring on this board, but it does not use the near ubiquitous WinBond chip as found on many motherboards, as it was omitted as a manufacturing option on our example. The P5A follows the ATX specification more closely than the vast majority of MVP3 based boards, as it places the CPU over to the left so as to seat it in the airflow from the ATX power supply. This is supposedly a measure to aid cooling, although we do have our doubts about this. The ATX power lead though is well positioned above the CPU's ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) Socket, meaning that no leads have to be pulled across the chip's heatsink and fan, thus aiding cooling. All Floppy disk and IDE leads are placed over to the right of the memory sockets reducing the need to pull leads over the CPU. The only minor gripe about this being that as they were all placed in a manner which made fitting the leads slightly fiddly. Setting up the CPU's speed, voltage and bus speed was all achieved by setting up around 4 sets of Jumpers. Asus did not provide us with anything as nice as Abit's Softmenu II, BIOS set up, or TMC's simple DIP switches. The settings for these were printed in rather large charts on the board itself (as well as being in the manual).
To find out what Baznet Solutions thinks of this board, read on........
Page 2.
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