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VIA Apollo Pro266 Socket370 DDR Chipset
Asus CUV266 and AOpen AX37 Plus - Page 2
22-July-01 - Review by: James "Agg" Rolfe

Asus CUV266

First impressions taking this board out of the box: weird layout. It's as though they tried to put the CPU socket in the centre of the board and had to work everything else around it. They only provide 5 PCI slots, but at the top of the board there's a huge empty space - moving everything up by an inch would have let them add the 6th PCI slot - at the moment, the AGP card sits in the 2nd-to-top backplate when mounted in a case. The slightly offset PCI-like slot is a CMR connector for cheapy modems/audio. I don't ever remember seeing another board with the RAM running horizontally (when board is mounted in a tower). Floppy connector placement is not great either - connecting from there to the floppy bay on an HX08 or similar fulltower will require a very long cable. However, having all the drive cables and ATX power together on the edge of the board will keep the CPU area clear of cables which is good for airflow and cooling.

Other connectors onboard, apart from the usual WOL, WOR etc include the AVPANEL header for connecting an Asus iPanel and, most bizarrely, a header for an optional card reader. Whether this is for smartcards or CF-type storage I'm not sure. There's an extra backplate included for connecting 2 extra USB ports to the motherboard. Also in the box is the manual which is standard fare for Asus these days, very clear and full of info but I think their jumper diagrams need to make it more obvious what colour means jumper on or off, a CD with drivers etc and the usual bundle of cables.

As mentioned earlier, the box also included a 128mb stick of NANYA-chipped PC2100 RAM. The RAM has a VIA sticker on it, so I'm not sure if this is something that VIA is including in review bundles (so that reviewers can check out the board even if they don't have a DDR stick lying around) or if it's normally included with this motherboard. I checked with Cougar who were the first site I could find selling this board and they say the ones they get don't have the ram. They also don't have onboard audio connectors - same as this one - but it's listed as an option in the manual. So you'd want to clarify exactly what you're getting for your money if you decide to buy a CUV266, it may well be different to what's listed in this review.

AOpen AX37 Plus

The second board on review today is AOpen's AX37 Plus. It's been a while since I've played with an AOpen board - the last one I reviewed was their i440BX-based AX6BC Pro II Mllennium Edition. In fact, this new board looks very similar to the earlier one, sporting a black PCB and chromed heatsink on the northbridge. I'm not aware of this new board being any kind of special edition or limited production though, so I'm not sure why AOpen are using their special colour scheme on it.

Anyway, in general layout it's similar to the earlier AOpen board too and to my mind is a lot more sensibly arranged than the Asus board in this review. AOpen actually cram quite a bit more onto their board - the full 6 PCI slots is a welcome sight and the board also has connectors for the onboard audio and an onboard Promise controller for IDE RAID. That's right, no hacking required, this is written-on-the-PCB, sticker-on-the-box Promise Technologies FastTrak100 Lite IDE RAID supporting RAID 0 (striping) and 1 (mirroring), which is what makes this board the "Plus" model.

The location of the power connector is a little annoying, as it means the bulky ATX power cable runs pretty much directly over the CPU socket. An unusual feature is the optional "Die Hard" BIOS, which is another BIOS socket (no chip present on the review unit), giving you a recovery option if a BIOS flash goes wrong. 3 fan headers and the capacity for 6 USB ports (2 on atx backplate, 2 on provided extra backplate and another connector on motherboard) round out the board. No CMR on this one, AOpen preferring the smaller AMR connector - much the same functionality, though.

The whole thing smacks of quality - I was even impressed by the bundle of stuff in the box. There's a big fold-out quickstart/troubleshooting sheet, a very clearly-written manual full of pictures and info, a surprisingly large manual for the Promise RAID controller (manual is branded AOpen), a CD with drivers and a copy of Norton AntiVirus 5.0 as well as the usual bundle of cables. First impressions of the AOpen board are definitely good.

Installation and Usage
The sheer width of these boards and the location of the IDE headers means they end up hidden behind drives in the lower bays of a midtower, but that's a fault they share with a lot of other boards. The AOpen's RAM slots are so positioned that you can't add or remove RAM without taking out the AGP card - it blocks the ramslot tabs from opening fully. Again, this is a common fault and one I've whinged about before on other boards. There are some large capacitors at the top right of the AOpen board which are begging to be mashed off by the back of a clumsily-installed CDROM drive - in a normal miditower the bottom 5.25 device slides neatly above them, but in a case like the SkyHawks 4388C (which squeezes an additional 5.25" bay into the midtower size) you could easily ruin your day by being hamfisted. There's a short delay (10 seconds or so) while the AOpen's onboard RAID controller looks for drives (and in my case, didn't find them). This doesn't bother me much but it's the kind of thing people whinge about.

The weird layout of the Asus board didn't present any dramas and may even help airflow as mentioned earlier. Having the CPU lower gets it more into the path of a front intake fan and the odd RAM orientation means no chance of conflict with the AGP slot. Apart from the lack of a 6th PCI slot, I couldn't really find any problem with the unusual layout.

Installing Win98SE on both boards was equally simple - like any VIA chipset, there's a couple of reboots required while it detects things and you'll want to install 4-in-1's once you have the machine running. I tested upgradeability by putting a drive from one of the testbeds using Intel's i815E chipset here into a Pro266 machine (and the same with a drive from a machine using the older Apollo Pro 133A chipset).. again, a couple of reboots, install the 4-in-1's and off you go. Things might be more interesting with Win2K but changing motherboards isn't (necessarily) the install-from-scratch nightmare it used to be.

The Asus survived a night of torture testing (a la Unreal flyby looping) with no complaints, while the AOpen dropped to the desktop at some point (at least 4 hours after beginning the test). Not sure exactly what happened on that run and it's not the most scientific of tests - I didn't experience a stability issue while actually using either board despite running a lot of benchmarks and playing a fair bit of 3DMark2001's Game Demo (cant get enough of that jumpy truck) on both.

One major issue I had with the AOpen was instability with the Corsair RAM at 266MHz and CAS2. CAS2.5 was rock-solid, but CAS2 produced bluescreen errors and registry corruptions. This is fairly serious, because Corsair rate the RAM to CAS2 and the Asus board ran it fine at that setting. Therefore in the benchmarks the AOpen scores consistently a little lower than the Asus - this memory setting is why.

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