Motherboard: ASUS P4S8X Review :: Setup and Overclocking

Being a jumper-free board means there are no jumpers or switches that must be adjusted just in order to get a posting on your motherboard and that makes things always go easier especially for the greenhorn novice who usually gets confused by such things.

All the headers and wire connections on the board are silk-screened in large clearly decipherable lettering making connecting your system wiring all the easier to take care of. As you can see in the photo below everything is easy to decipher and read without the need to use bi-focal glasses.

If you have something wrong the board has a vocal post assistant that will tell you by voice what the problem may be. The first time I ever heard one of these things it was kind of creepy which probably had to do with the fact that I was not expecting my motherboard to talk to me.

All the power connectors except one, which is above the ZIF socket, are located under the CPU and near the rear of the board near the power supply. The P4S8X offers the user the option of using the older non-P4 approved power supplies by offering a 12V power adapter on-board which allows the use of a any standard PS connector found on many earlier power supplies.

ASUS like ABIT has always been overclocker friendly and their BIOS options reflect that fact allowing pushing your system well beyond spec. You can change the v-core, AGP and memory voltage settings all factors that help insure stability when overclocking the system by means of increasing the systems FSB.

I had no problems getting my 2.0GHz P4 to run as a 2.3GHz P4 by just a slight increase on the core voltage from 1.5V to 1.65V and changing the FSB from 100MHz to 115MHz. These results came easily and we were only using only a stock cooling solution. Better cooling solutions abound and results vary from CPU to CPU so you can try your own luck and do a little tinkering yourself.

There are available options for system hardware monitoring as well allowing you to keep an eye on things like CPU and system fan speeds along with both the CPU and system temperature. Intel based system are able to run the CPU at lower temperatures than its Athlon rival so overclocking is able to be achieved quite easily if a good cooling solution is implemented into your system design.

Flashing the BIOS on an ASUS motherboard is a very easy task to accomplish as they offer an option that helps eliminate the pain in the arse procedure this can be if anything goes wrong. To the beginner flashing the BIOS is almost like taboo tribal mumbo jumbo best left to witch doctors and shaman of the trade.

All you need to so here is download the appropriate file from ASUS, install it into the system then run the program which if connected to the Internet will automatically flash your BIOS eliminating any of the hassles usually associated with taking care of this procedure. Windows installation in addition to the system drivers off the motherboards included CD went very smoothly making for a overall very user friendly setup for both the hardware and software. Lets check out the performance and see how well the board stands up against the competition.