The Asus P2B is one of the
best Slot 1 boards I have had the pleasure of using. It is highly configurable and very
stable. I find it to be a great board for anyone upgrading to the Slot 1 setup.

One nice thing about this board is that Asus seems to
have put what is really needed on it. We are provided with 3 ISA slots, which is useful
for those of use who still use ISA cards, which most of us do. At the same time, the board
provides a hearty 4 PCI slots, and 1 AGP slot. With 3 DIMM slots, we have room for more
SDRAM than we would probably ever want. Setting the board up is pretty easy. The board
comes with the typical well-written Asus manual which outlines all of the jumper settings.
At the same time, the basic jumper settings are printed on the board’s surface. In fact,
one could set this board up rather easily without looking at the manual.

The board comes bundled with all of the hardware needed
for mounting and CPU installation. A bundled CD-ROM contains some useful utilities:
Desktop Management Interface Utility, a Flash Memory Writer (used to upgrade the Flash
BIOS), LANDesk Client Manager Software, and the Asus PC Probe Utility.

The Award BIOS is simple to use and highly configurable.
Most of the board’s settings can either be put into Auto mode or be set manually. Advanced
features such as CAS latency and memory timings can be controlled to tweak the performance
that extra hair.

The board was very stable though all of my testing. In
fact, it never crashed. At the time of testing, only one processor was available for
testing, the Pentium II-266. The board ran flawlessly at all major speeds: 66×4.0,
100×2.5, 100×3.0, 103×3.0, 112×2.5. The 133MHz bus speed is not mentioned in the manual,
but this is not a big deal because, for the most part, there is no memory fast enough to
withstand this speed.

During the testing, the board scored a 54.9 at the 66 x
4.0 setting, and 56.9 with the 100 x 3.0 setting under ZD Business WinStone 97. All BIOS
setting were set to Auto or default in order to be as close as possible to the
configuration of the typical user.

There aren’t really any major flaws to this board at all.
I did find that the board was a tad small for the ATX form factor, meaning that it was a
little cramped. This really wasn’t much of a problem, though, unless I was trying to flip
the jumpers on the board while still in the case.

Overall, this board is great for anyone: the typical
business user or the avid overclocker.

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