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Installation under Win98 was not too problematic. i820 support is not included in the normal Win98 CD but Asus provide drivers on a CD in the box. You also get a comprehensive manual, UDMA/66 cable, UDMA/33 cable and floppy cable. The CD contains Asus PC Probe, a generic hardware monitor but inferior to MBM in my opinion, Trend PC-Cillin AntiVirus and drivers for the optional Yamaha sound hardware (not included on the review unit).

I noticed some odd hardware compatability while using this motherboard. Firstly it refused to recognize my Acer 8X cdrom. It would detect it, but always reported an error during the POST and would refuse to boot. Swapping this for an ASUS 50X drive fixed it. Also, I have an AOpen PA3030 video card in for testing at the moment. This is the video card with the new Open Bios on it. I could not enter the BIOS on that video card using this motherboard. On my Soyo SY6-VBA-133 (Via Apollo Pro), AOpen AX6BC Pro (BX) or Abit BP6 (BX) pressing INS during the video initialization screen would get me to the BIOS. On this motherboard it was ignored. It also seems to not like either of the KingMax PC133 sticks I tried it with. It would freeze solid after about 5 seconds of 3DMark2000, even at 100MHz. Admittedly, the Soyo board isn't all that keen on the KingMax sticks either so the problem may be with the RAM rather than the boards.

The second major flaw with this motherboard seems to be stability. I had a few bluescreen errors during the Win98 install and during benchmarking. I experienced these with 2 different video cards (both TNT2U, admittedly), 4 different sticks of ram (128MB and 64MB KingMax PC133, 128MB HTL PC100 and some no-name 128MB PC100) and a couple of different hard drives. I guess some people will point the finger at the C400 @ 600 I used for testing (as I have no P3's here and I couldn't find a P2 cooler that would let me use the P2 on the board). However that chip has been rock-stable in a variety of motherboards for months now - in fact, I used it for comparative benchmarking in 2 other motherboards with no issues at all. It really seems to me that the Asus motherboard was the source of the instability. 3DMark2000 would vanish in mid-test and I would get the occasional bluescreen during gaming and Sandra benchmarking. Oddly, 3DMark2000 would complain of corrupted or missing files after a few runs, but this would be fixed by a reboot. This was in a Macase K10 midtower with the included 300W PSU. This was all at 100MHz so well within spec for the board.

Benchmarking
I did some benchmarking of the board with a C400 at 600MHz using a stick of HTL PC100 SDRAM and a Diamond Viper V770 Ultra video card at standard clock. For interest's sake I compared it to 2 other chipsets here, namely i440BX, which has become the standard over the last year or so, and the VIA Apollo Pro 133 chipset. VIA of course have now released their 133A so are not properly represented here, but it's an interesting comparison anyway.

You can see above that the CPU and FPU scores are pretty much identical. The chipset doesn't have much bearing on the apparent speed of the CPU itself. However once you start moving large amounts of data around in memory the i440BX really shines - basically twice as fast as the Via chipset and well ahead of i820. There really seems to be no beating the i440BX chipset for sheer grunt at moving things around in memory. Of course, this specific implementation should not be taken as a complete picture of the i820 chipset's speed - keep in mind that all memory access on this board must go via the Memory Translator Hub which is obviously causing a big hit to RAM performance. However this will always be true for this specific motherboard.

3DMark2000 benchmarking was carried out on each machine in a vanilla Win98 install with Detonator 3.53 and DirectX 7.0 installed. Again, a C400 @ 600MHz was used with a stick of HTL PC100 RAM and a Viper V770U at standard clock. You can see the i440BX board stretching well out in front of the other 2 chipsets - consistently 10% faster than i820. This is obviously due to the higher memory speed which has a huge effect on general performance.

Conclusions
Well, in conclusion it is hard to recommend this motherboard. The advantages of i820 are soon overshadowed by the speed penalty of the memory translator hub and the general instability of the board. The former is more a failing of the technology rather than this specific implementation. i820 was designed around the use of RAMBUS but the failings and impracticalities of that memory technology have forced manufacturers towards other solutions. Asus can't really be blamed for the poor memory performance as they are restricted by the design of the chipset. However the instability of the board even at it's lowest FSB and the strange hardware incompatabilities tend to indicate a greater issue with this motherboard. Even the physical layout of the board will be problematic for overclockers because of the space restrictions in front of the Slot1. Overall a dissapointing product from Asus.