Introduction

It's coming!

We keep on hearing about how DDR is coming. It's going to be the wave of the future! It's going to be bigger than Tang and Spam sandwiches! But if you look around, there hasn't really been much on the DDR front - a few previews maybe, a handful of reviews. DDR might be more popular than a RIMM based system, but even in our office no one has made the jump away from conventional SDRAM. The general consensus seems to be that current systems don't really require massive improvements in memory bandwidth. Until we start seeing 2GHz processors, I don't think many people will be jumping ship.

Bringing us to our topic, the ASUS CUV266. The board brings together DDR RAM and the Pentium III. Now that they have been combined, it's time to test them out. Lets take a look at what this motherboard has to offer.

ASUS CUV266

Features

Socket 370 for Pentium III Processors

VIA Apollo PRO266 chipset
VIA VT8633 North Bridge
VIA VT8233 South Bridge
iTE IT8703F-A Super I/O Controller
2 Mbit Programmable Flash ROM

3 DIMM Slots - 3 GB support

5 PCI Slots
1 AGP Pro (4x) Slot
1 AMR Slot

2 IDE Connectors (UltraDMA/100 Support)
1 ASUS iPanel Connector
1 Parallel Port
3 USB Headers

System Voltage Monitoring (Integrated in ASUS Asic)
3 Fan Connectors

Onboard status LED

Hrm?

We left out the obvious features like "keyboard connector" and such. Rest assured, they're all there.

The board does have quite a few bells and whistles. Note the presence of not one extra USB connector, but two! Unfortunately, we searched the box, but didn't find any extra USB headers needed to take advantage of the connectors.

You'll find a 128 MB stick of PC2100 DDR SDRAM packaged with the board - a nice incentive to get the board if you don't quite have a stockpile of DDR RAM lying about.

Also note the presence of an AGP Pro slot, although, not particularly useful at the moment. There's also a connector for a SmartCard reader.