Summary and Conclusion
ASUS have brought an excellent KT400 motherboard to the table, offering a comprehensive number of ports and some unique features. The board also proved to have excellent stability, even when overclocked beyond specifications. Installation of windows XP was problem free and the supplied driver cd installed all necessary drivers correctly.
The board also offers slightly higher performance than other KT400 boards out there, although the performance difference is very small. Unique features such as the gigabit ethernet port may be a key selling point for some people, and this should be taken into account when purchasing your next motherboard upgrade.
Although this board is excellent, you may want to hold on for the Nvidia N-Force2 based boards. Early reviews have shown them to have significant performance gains under certain configurations and a greater feature set. On the other hand N-force 2 is a brand new chipset and it may be wise to wait for drivers to mature before rushing out and buying one.
Pro's
- Excellent Stability
- Great overclocking BIOS features
- Excellent performance
- Capable of very high bus speeds
- Serial ATA, Firewire and USB 2.0 ports
- Good quality onboard hardware
- 6 PCI slots
- Onboard Gigabit LAN
- Useful BIOS features such as EZ-Flash and Q-Fan control
- Good price, considering the Gigabit LAN interface.
Con's
- Limited over-volting options
- Port brackets take up PCI slot spaces
Overall rating 9/10 - An excellent board offering a some unique features.
