So, I went and plugged in my devices and did a clean Windows ME and 2000 install. After installation, unlike my past experiences with AMD Athlon chipsets, I didn't have to install any of the drivers that were included on the CD because Intel chipsets have always run great out of the box. Stability was top-notch and I haven't witnessed a single hardware-related crash after heavy use on this machine for the past 2 weeks.

The BIOS
The BIOS of this board is where it really shines. On top of allowing you to set the Front Side Bus and CPU speed from the BIOS like most other manufacturers these days do, Asus has taken that concept one step further by showing every single bus speed/memory speed/PCI speed possible that you can choose in the BIOS. Overclockers will love this feature, as they won't have to manually calculate the PCI speed or memory speed because the BIOS will display everything for them! Voltage selection starts from 1.70v all the way up to 2.10v, in 0.05v increments when I had my Pentium III 1GHz processor plugged in, but I suspect that many lower settings such as 1.60v and 1.65v will appear if I plugged in a slower Intel processor that required lower voltage requirements than my Pentium III 1GHz processor (the 1Ghz version of the Pentium III uses 1.70v, while most other processors from 500-850MHz should require only 1.60v).

There are also a handful of FSB speed selections in the BIOS. The CUSL2 can go from 66MHz-93MHz in 1MHz increments, then from 100MHz all the way up to 166MHz, again, in 1MHz increments. All these settings and the capability of moving up by 1MHz increments, makes this board the perfect board for overclockers.

There was, however, a minor problem with the BIOS and my Pentium III 1GHz processor. The BIOS didn't recognize the 1GHz processor, so every time the computer booted up, it would give this annoying message telling me that the processor doesn't match with what's in the BIOS. Fortunately, operation of the computer was not affected by this problem, and I still could overclock the processor through the BIOS just like any other processor. A recent Asus BIOS update has fixed this problem, however.

The Bad
Unfortunately, my experience with this board (and chipset) has not been the best that I'd expect from an ASUS board. I decided to check out just how bad the integrated graphics were, but there was a major problem that prevented me from switching back to the integrated graphics. From what I know about the i815/i815E chipsets, the integrated video would disable itself after an AGP card was plugged in, but I never knew it wouldn't work the other way around!

So, I unplugged the AGP card and plugged my monitor cable into the integrated video port on the motherboard, turned on the computer and waited...

And waited... and waited... but I didn't get a single video signal.

So, I thought, maybe if I reset the BIOS it would work, so I went searching for the jumper in the manual to clear the BIOS, but I was unable to find it. A quick look through the entire board didn't turn up any jumpers or such that could be used for this function. My last resort was to remove the battery (something that I never had to do before in my life, so I was a bit hesitant at first) and, sure enough, when I put the battery back in and turned on the computer, the integrated video began working.

I'm not sure if this integrated video problem is a common occurrence in all i815/i815E boards, but it sure can get annoying, especially when you need to swap components in and out of your computer everyday like I have to do. I did, however, check that all was well when I plugged my AGP card back in, and, sure enough, the integrated video did switch itself off and the display defaulted to my AGP video card as it's supposed to.

I decided not to conduct any benchmarks on this motherboard because I currently don't have any other platform that will run my Pentium III 1GHz processor so that I can make some comparisons. Benchmarks are used for making comparisons, so if I can't compare the benchmark results with anything else, there's really not point in doing the benchmarks anyways.

On to: Conclusion