Singapore Hardware Zone

ASUS MEL-M Socket-370 Motherboard
Reviewed by Vijay Anand (18/2/98)

Motherboard Specifications

Processor

  • Intel Celeron® Processor 300MHz and above (66Mhz bus, Socket-370 type).
  • Socket-370 for Future Expansion.

Chipset

  • Intel 82440 LX AGPset

Cache memory

  • CPU Built-in 128KB L2 cache for Celeron Processor

System Memory

  • 3 x 168-pin 3.3v DIMM sockets support
  • Supports 8/16/32/64/128/256 MB DIMM Module
  • Supports SDRAM PC66 & 100(Supports ECC, 72 bit)
  • Supports 8MB to 768MB DRAM Size
  • Supports 50, 60, 66, 68, 75, 83 MHz System Clock Speed Setting
  • Supports 3.0-8.0 Multiplier Setting

PCI IDE

  • 2 X PCI Bus Master UDMA/33 IDE ports (up to 4 ATAPI Devices)
  • Supports for PIO Mode 3, 4, UDMA/33 IDE & ATAPI CD-ROM

I/O Interface

  • 1x floppy port (360KB-2.88MB)
  • 2x serial ports (16550 high-speed)
  • 1x parallel port (SPP/EPP/ECP)
  • PS/2 Keyboard
  • PS/2 Mouse
  • 2x USB
  • 1 Audio port (Line-Out, Line-In and Mic-In) and 1 MIDI/Game Port

Expansion slot

  • 3 x PCI 32-bit slots, PCI 2.1 compliant
  • 1 x ISA 16-bit slots
  • 1x AGP (1x & 2x Mode,66/133MHz) slot
  • Supports Creative PCI Sound Card SB-Link™.

Power Management

  • Power On by LAN, RTC Alarm, Modem ring on, Keyboard & Mouse & Soft-Power Switch
  • Power Off by Windows® 95 Shut down & Soft-Power Switch
  • Supports 3 Level ACPI LED

Form Factor

  • Micro-ATX Form Factor, 4 layer PCB
  • Fits in Regular ATX Case
  • ATX Connector on Board
  • Double Deck ATX Back Panel

BIOS

  • 2 Mbit (256KB) FLASH RAM
  • Award PCI BIOS with Green, PnP, DMI, INT13 (HD>8.4)and Anti-Virus Functions +
    Anti-Boot Virus Bios by Trend ChipAway.
  • LS120, ZIP, ATAPI CD-ROM, IDE #1, #2, #3, #4 Bootable

<Introduction><The Good><The Bad><Conclusion><Rating>

Back to top


Introduction

Soon after Intel launched their Socket-370 variants of their Celeron CPUs, ASUS slowly launched their line of Socket-370(S-370) motherboards. Just from ASUS, there are a total of 6 varieties of S-370 boards to choose from!! They all use nearly the same board layouts with the difference being the chipset used(LX, ZX, BX) and with or without integrated video for those boards, therefore 6 in total. All of them are using the Micro-ATX form factor. Just think how many more variaties are available from other competitors! Asus always has a well-built product with good performance albeit the higher cost, so let's see how it fares.

The contents of the box include the following: 1 MEL-M motherboard, 1 packet of FDD & HDD cable, 1 Drivers+Utility-CD, 1 motherboard-manual & 1 Guarantee Card. Lets hop into the good stuff!

   Back to top


The Good

A Micro-ATX format board was chosen by ASUS most likely because the prospective owners of a S370 motherboard would be home users and those on smaller budgets. Therefore these people wouldn't normally buy many items to stuff the motherboard. Plus, ASUS has already integrated sound functionality in all of it's S-370 motherboards, e.g. this board has an integrated Yamaha YMF740C-V chipset. I've used a low-end soundcard based on this chipset before and it provides decent sound, enough to make normal users content. Only those of us who think that Audio too is an important part of their system, play games mostly or deal with sound related content would want to consider getting the industry's latest offerings(hint: SB-Live and Diamond MMX300). Since the board is made in a Micro-ATX format, expansion is a conservative 3/1/1(PCI/ISA/AGP) slot configuration. The main connectors like the FDD,HDD, all various casing connectors & the 3 DIMM slots are easily accessible in front of the board and are well labelled.

Since Audio is integrated on the board, how would you connect your speakers and CD-ROM drive? Well the ATX back-panel is longer(still in-line with all ATX casing specs) to accommodate the Joystick and the 3 connectors(Line/Mic-in and Line-out). On the board, we have 2 AUX, 2 CD and voice-modem-in connectors. You'll still find the SB-link connector that is required for a few PCI sound-cards.

Thank goodness ASUS has changed the FSB and multiplier controls from the old jumper-based control to the much easier DIP-switch block. All of it's S-370 boards come with this type of setup and the best thing is that it's located right up front of the board (same goes for fan connectors). We can see that ASUS has changed their style from user-feedback. This DIP-switch block also has one setting to enable or disable the on-board Audio, if the user has or gets a better sound-card. One more setting in that DIP-switch block, is a setting when enabled will give you 0.1V more I/O voltage. Have a look at the below which is extracted from the ASUS website:

Intel CPU Model

Speed

Ratio Ext. clk DIP1 DIP2 DIP3 DIP4 DIP7 DIP8 DIP9 DIP10
Celeron (PPGA) 366MHz 5.5x 66Mhz OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF ON
Celeron (PPGA) 333MHz 5.0x 66Mhz OFF OFF OFF OFF ON OFF OFF ON
Celeron (PPGA) 300MHz 4.0x 66Mhz OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF ON OFF ON


Asus did have a Bios controlled setup for their 1st revisions of their LX board, but was not functioning too well & Asus removed it. Till now they have shy away from the modern Bios controlled setup. Anyway, the DIP-switch block is a good move for Asus and has printed all the settings on the board for your convenience. In the Asus manual, the specs printed stay strict in accordance with Intel's specs. Looking closely at the settings printed on the motherboard, you can see some settings for a wider range of FSB settings like 50, 60, 66, 68, 75, 83MHz but unfortunately, there is no 1/3 divider option to derive the PCI and AGP bus-speed.

The board even comes with an Anti-Boot Virus Bios by Trend-ChipAway, in case your struck with a nasty virus that threatens to corrupt the Bios. It's very much better than the standard virus-protection offered in most of the boards.

The given CD comes with these software: PC-cillin Anti-Virus ver.3, Asus PC Probe 1.2, Yamaha XGstudio Player/Mixer and YSTATION-32. The Asus PC Probe is a very neat program that gives you a nice visual indication of the Fan's rotation status/speed, PC temp status, PC voltage status and a summary of all 3. Most important I guess would be the temp status and this board is able to monitor both the CPU and motherboard temp. Yamaha's software interface was simple, modern and cool too. Due to some circumstances at the time of testing, I was unable to take snapshots of these software.

The Manual is of course the normal Asus standard that is well presented and is one of the best motherboard manuals. It has got more diagrams than most motherboard manuals which simplify understanding & gives a better view of the installation procedure.

The Test

The processor used for this test is a PPGA-Socket-370 Celeron-333 which is of the SL35R batch & was quite overclockable for me. Usually I'm limited in my processor speed choices as it is multiplier-locked at 5x & using the 75 or 83MHz FSB would hang on Windows boot-up, due to AGP card being overclocked by the faster AGP bus. But this time it worked, thanks to the high tolerance of the Cardex-TNT (I wonder if all TNT's can run well at 75/83Mhz FSB?). But unfortunately, this is an LX based board, 83Mhz was the max setting offered and only has a divider of 2 to derive AGP and PCI bus-speeds.

Test Configuration

Processor(s): Celeron - 333 Retail, batch=SL35R, 2.0V, Malay
RAM: 1 - 64MB Hitachi PC100 SDRAM DIMM
Hard Drive(s): IBM Deskstar-3 3.2G
Video Card(s): Cardex-TNT, 16mb SDRAM
Bus Master Drivers: Windows 98 Bus Mastering Drivers
Video Drivers: Ver: 4.10.01.0044
Operation System(s): Windows 98 (build 4.10.1998)

Wintune 98 Results

Area Tested C-300a
(60x5)
C-333
(66x5)
C-375
(75x5)
C-415
(83x5)
CPU Integer (MIPS) 851.5308 947.8386 1066.729 1185.666
CPU Floating Point (MFLOPS) 342.2564 380.9829 431.2077 476.348
Video(2D) (MPixeles/s) 51.58683 56.68627 63.68315 70.28507
Direct3D (MPixeles/s) 102.7776 101.5567 106.7535 108.7862
OpenGL (MPixels/s) 82.13792 83.42599 85.85236 87.51847
Memory (MB/s) 540.4493 607.0911 682.9353 761.1308
Cached Disk (MB/s) 55.658 61.10048 67.69032 77.30997
Uncached Disk (MB/s) 2.042018 1.950853 2.061816 2.169254


*Take note of the abnormal scores that I've highlighted in red. I've re-run the test several times but all yielded about the same abnormal scores. 300Mhz with 60Mhz bus beating a 333Mhz with 66Mhz bus? Very odd! But other tests were ok.

I wonder if I'm lucky with the video-cards I'm testing with or is it the well-done ASUS motherboard?! I had no problems using 75/83Mhz bus in both my ASUS P2B and this MEL-M motherboard reviews. Another thing we can conclude from here is that the nVidia-TNT drivers are not well optimised for 2D, although you don't see any performance degradation. You can compare these Celeron results to the AMD results in my Cardex-TNT review, both are similar. Check out the Spectra-2500 review of how good the scores can be when drivers are well optimized, even under an AMD CPU.

Sisoft Sandra-98 & Norton SI

CPU speed NU Sys Info (pts) Sisoft CPU
benchmark (MIPS)
Sisoft FPU
benchmark (MFLOPS)
Sisoft memory
benchmark (MB/s)
AMD K6-2-300MHz (100 x 3) 131.6 856 177 91
Intel Celeron-300MHz (60 x 5) 95.5 717 180 122
Intel Celeron-333MHz (66 x 5) 105.6 794 200 135
Intel Celeron-375MHz (75 x 5) 126 898 226 153
Intel Celeron-415MHz (83 x 5) 133.3 998 251 171


This is just a comparison of an AMD system to a Celeron system to give you users an idea where do they stand. The AMD system has: AX59Pro 'CE', 64MB PC100 LGS, the same IBM 3.2GB, the same Cardex-TNT AGP, Win98. The Norton System information Benchmarks the CPU, Cache and Motherboard. From the results, we can see the Celeron scores very low in this area and the reason could be for is its small 128K cache and the LX chipset. The P2 will get much higher scores. For the Sisoft CPU benchmark, we can see the K6-2 does well at business applications and Integers. THe FPU benchmark very well shows that the AMD's FPU isn't as powerful as the Celeron or P2, essential for 3D gaming and intensive applications like rendering and CAD. Memory Benchmark clearly tells that the Intel's LX chipset implementation is much superior to the VIA-MVP3 chipset in accessing memory.

Back to top


The Bad

The ATX connector is at the back of the board behind the socket. This can cause some obstruction of the air flow as most of the time, the ATX power line will pass over the Celeron-chip & it can mess up a clean looking interior. Also if you want to access some parts of the motherboard, you'll need to disconnect the ATX power-line. The Audio related connectors are at the back of the board, a bit inconvenient but not as important as the other connections which are housed in front.

I think some of us would prefer the board without audio functionality and choose one of our own, hence it will lower the cost of the board and be more competitive. But removing the sound functionlity will mean that 1 of the few remaining slots must be filled. Which comes to the next bad point, the expansion is a bit limiting, considering that it uses a full blown LX chipset. I bet many of us would like ASUS to use a standard ATX board and put in more expansion slots.

For those who might overclock the FSB, it's better to add a neat little heatsink for the LX chipset which is quite hot.

And I bet the no.1 problem with this board is that it's using an LX chipset which basically limits us from using any 100Mhz bus CPUs or above. So we can only use this board as long as Intel churns out 66MHz bus Celerons. Another thorn is that it's using a Socket-370 solution. As long as well performing CPUs are abundant in the near future like the current Celeron line, this shouldn't be a problem. One might think the Slot-1 would last longer and is a better assurance, but in the long run when intel uses the 0.18 micron process to manufacture their new CPUs, they may abandon the Slot solution as they can squeeze 512K cache affordably and comfortably in a Socket solution. I bet it might be another design like e.g. a Socket-400 as Intel usually likes to really differentiate it's products.

Back to top


Conclusion

It's a fast board suitable for home or for the average office user in terms of features and expandability. It retails for $205 at the time of writing, somewhat on the pricey side but hey! It's a a solid board by a very reputable manufacturer, ASUS. Do look out for the same specificationed ZX (MEZ-M) or BX (MEB-M) based Socket-370 motherboard. If they don't cost much more than this LX board, then it's more worth to go with them.


MOTHERBOARD RATING

Overall Rating (Out of a maximum of 5 Star)

Installation *****
Performance ****
Price ***
Overclockability ***
Material Quality *****
Stability *****
Overall Rating ****

award_2d_4star.jpg (8295 bytes)

Back to top


This Product is provided courtesy of,

AI-EN Enterprises Pte. Ltd.

Copyright © 1998 by Singapore Hardware Zone. All rights reserved.

None of the above shall be reproduced, copied and/or
modified without the permission of the WebMaster.