April 14, 99

A major problem in today’s world is that, more often than not, looks are deceiving. Making shit shine (pardon the vulgar expression) appears to be one of the major goals of advertisement, and fancy pseudofeatures and gimmicks often cover up the internal flaws of the product behind the clever marketing strategy. Not that marketing by itself is a bad thing, it is a legitimate way of distributing information to the potential customers. Unfortunately the efforts spent on marketing are often also inversely correlated to the amount of engagement towards research and development as we have all learned in the past few months from a major microprocessor manufacturer (no pun intended, it only hurts if it is true).

In any case, there are a few products that are often overlooked because it appears as if the manufacturer deliberately has chosen a wallflower image. Needless to say that this by itself requires a powerful position to begin with. For example, being the world’s largest mainboard manufacturer could qualify among other things, as, for example, a guaranteed market share owing to contracts with major OEMs. If the title of this review hadn’t spoiled it already, it probably would be clear by now that the company we are dealing with is none but ASUS. Symptomatic for this shadowy role of ASUS is certainly also the fact that there is relatively little informantion on their Slot1 boards available, pertaining to the the fact that ASUS does not deem it a necessity to send out evaluation copies to everyone in the world. However, in their infinite wisdom, the media relation department did send us a sample of their P2B F, Revision 1.10, possibly because the philosophy of LostCircuits regarding quality over advertising is along the same lines as the idea behind ASUS products.

Judging from the amounts of email we received regarding this matter, this mainboard review on LostCircuits has been quite overdue. This is partly owing to the fact that the relation between LostCircuits and ASUS has not always been too sweet, moreover, from looking at the P2B, it is hardly conceivable why everyone involved with this review was so enthousiastic about it.. However, to give credit where credit is due, a few months ago when the battle between supporters of Abit’s BH6 and a previous version of the P2B was at its peak, Tom’s Hardware also heavily favored the ASUS product despite its obvious lack of fancyness. So what is this board all about?

All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws. Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this site.
Copyright 1999 LostCircuits