Reply 20 of 31, by dionb
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wrote:Here's an unpopular opinion: Asus is heavily overrated. Make no mistake, every motherboard I ever used was from Asus. They are f […]
Here's an unpopular opinion: Asus is heavily overrated. Make no mistake, every motherboard I ever used was from Asus. They are fine and solid boards. But as far as retro hardware goes — make sure you're getting a tested board. Somehow every dead or unstable boards I got over the 5 years I'm in the hobby was from Asus. Here are just some examples: TX97-X, P/I-XP6NP5 and even P3B-F.
I have a theory that Asus tended to make OC-friendly products (e.g. 430TX for 83MHz bus, 440BX for 133MHz, etc) which ensured their success on the market but also heavily shortened the lifespan of the actual hardware. So when you read something like this:
the T2P4 is legendary.
You have to understand that someone probably once used this board to extract the absolute most performance out of his/her hardware. So I would advice to only buy Asus boards for cheap or tested.
Not so sure about that being the cause. Asus boards were never the overclockers' favorites; they had more options than OEM, but you could get better OC options for less if that was what you were after. They were the "Mercedes" of the motherboard market, one of the few names with actual brand recognition in the 1990s, where you paid a premium for what was supposed to be a stable, well-built and well-documented product. The P3B-F was a case in point: yes, you could overclock with it, but every review in 1999 said you were better off with Abit boards like the BE6 or BF6 for overclocking, or you could get similar options from say the AOpen AX6BC for significantly less.
As for overclocking PPro... if you could afford a PPro in ~1997, you didn't overclock. There might have been an individual somewhere who did, but "people running Windows NT" was hardly synonymous with "ricing overclockers pulling every last MHz and FPS out of their system".
In the case of the PI/P55T2P4 rev 3.10, you might have a point, the board became sought-after around the turn of the millennium, specifically due to this article:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/oldie-tuning,216.html
But that's one board, and wouldn't have applied to any other Asus boards.
However, I agree with your statement that Asus is overrated in terms of quality, and that the boards don't all age well. Personally I'd say that applies particularly to their P4 boards. Even when they were still more or less current, the number of unexpectedly dead Asus P4Pxxx boards I case across was awful. Around 2005 I frequented computer fairs where I bought boxes of (assumed dead) motherboards. Generally about 1/3 was completely dead, and at least 1/3 could be resurrected to full functionality (usually recovering from a bad BIOS flash, although sometimes CMOS reset was enough). Not so the then new-ish Asus boards, they were almost always stone dead, usually due to something going terribly wrong in the voltage regulator area. This was also the era where with Asus boards you needed to *exactly* follow the memory QVL, as other DIMMs even fully within spec tended not to work, whereas those same DIMMs would work fine on other boards with identical chipset and specs from other vendors, without any performance benefit on the picky Asus boards (I particularly recall my housemate's new A7N8X-E vs my Gigabyte GA-7N400L pulled out of one of those 'as dead' boxes - in the end we swapped RAM as my board would eat anything but the only DIMMs that would work on his were mine).
But apart from the P55T2P4 this is all somewhat offtopic here in this necro-bump topc. Interestingly (but n=1), I also encountered a similarly stone-dead XP55T2P4. The interesting thing here being that this ATX version lacks all the overclocking option of its AT sister (66MHz max PLL), so whatever happened, it wasn't the result of excessive overclocking.
Other minor issue with most of their late Socket 7 AT boards is non-standard PS/2 pinout. Instead of a regular header they have a USB/MIR/PS2 board like this:
Is there such a thing as a 'standard' PS/2 pinout? No two boards of any vendor seem to have the same connector let alone pinout for it... I'm no Asus fan, but here the problem seems to be lack of standard itself, not Asus deviating from whatever standard there is.
