Overclocking
The Asus board provides overclocking both via BIOS and using jumper switches - this seems to be the norm for Asus boards these days. In the BIOS you can choose the FSB in increments of 1MHz from 66MHz right up to 193MHz. One strange thing is that, when boosting the FSB with the jumpers, you lose the ability to set voltage via the BIOS. Presumably you are meant to set everything via the jumpers once you set it out of "Jumper-free" mode. However, there were no voltage adjust jumpers on my board. Odd. Anyway, by turning off UDMA on the HDD to avoid data corrpuption, setting the RAM to some conservative settings and boosting the core voltage by .1v, I was able to get the Asus stable at 176MHz FSB, which is not too shabby at all. Of course, stability is a relative term - I couldn't run any 3D applications, but this was due to my video card freaking out at the high AGP setting, I suspect. If could boot windows fine, run WCPUID and Sandra CPU / MultiMedia / Memory benchmarks, then shut down cleanly I call it stable. At 177MHz FSB the machine would give registry errors at boot. This was with the BIOS - with the jumpers I had less success because the settings are not as fine - you have to jump from 175MHz FSB to 185MHz FSB - it would do 175 fine, but unsurprisingly not 185.

click to enlarge

The AOpen doesn't have jumpers at all, but in the BIOS allows for 1MHz FSB increments right up to an insane 248MHz. It says in the manual that it allows down to 66MHz, but with my P3-667EB installed the lowest I could set was 133MHz. I don't have a Celeron here at the moment, so I'm hoping the AOpen will auto-detect the CPU type and allow that lower range.. if not, this board will be unsuitable for Celerons and even some P3's. I thought there might be a jumper to set the range (as found on some Soyo boards), but nope, not in the manual and not that I could see onboard. Anyway, in reality, the highest I could get it with the same settings and components as the Asus board was 165MHz FSB - still respectable but lower than the Asus.

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Remember for both these sets of benchmarks the memory score will be low due to the conservative settings used.

Conclusions
When talking about AMD-based systems everyone seems to be in agreement about DDR. It's a nice performance boost, but it's not worth chucking your SDR motherboard and RAM for. Sure, if you're building a new system, or you're looking for a new motherboard and RAM for some other reason, then DDR is probably a good choice. It'll give you a little future-proofing and you get a bit of a performance boost. Looking at the Socket370 side of things though, or at the very least this chipset, it's less clear. The performance boost is there, but it's very small. Given that the DDR memory is the same across platforms, the deficiency must be either something specific to the Intel architecture, or to the Apollo Pro266 chipset. For the moment I'm thinking it's chipset related - this may be something that new BIOSes or new drivers fix, but regardless I'll be watching the next Socket370 DDR chipset with interest.

ComputerAlliance offer the AOpen AX37Plus for $389 including a 128mb stick of Transcend PC2100. The CUV266 is about $400 - they can order it in - but doesn't include RAM.

But, if you're not to be swayed and insist on buying into Socket370 DDR now.. of these two boards, I'd pick the Asus. The Aopen is feature-packed and looks very spiffy, but is dissapointing in terms of stability and performance. The Asus may look a little strange, but it's a stable platform with respectable speed and overclocks nicely. You do pay extra for it, though.

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