With four DIMM slots and five PCI slots, there is nothing low-end about the CUC2000. Add the overclockability of the 500 to 600MHz Coppermine Pentium IIIs with the robust i820 chipset and you have the potential for a blazing fast yet inexpensive system. And unlike i810 based boards, the CUC2000 has an AGP slot and is not crippled with slow video performance.
Faster FCPGA processors are coming. Are you prepared?
As is common knowledge now, ASUS is working on a KX133 motherboard. The K7V is ASUS' shot for the high-end of the Athlon market. With five PCI, three DIMM, one AGP and one AMR slot, expansion is not going to be a problem. The board will support the standard KX133 feature set, including PC133 memory and UDMA ATA/66.
We liked ASUS original K7 motherboard enough to put it in our Buyer's Guide. We're eager to see how good their second effort is.
ASUS has a motherboard in the works with an onboard TNT2 video processor. When we left Taiwan, the board was in the final stages of testing. It should ship sometime in April. This should be a great board for cost conscious gamers looking for ASUS quality.
ASUS dropped a little interesting tidbit of information on us. It turns out that the 1GHz Coppermine CPU has special design needs in motherboards. On Intel Coppermine CPUs up to 850MHz, four pins are used to determine the CPU multiplier. Above 850MHz, no pins are used. Four pins give you 16 possible settings, and apparently they run out of settings after an 8.5x multiplier. Therefore, to work with a 1GHz Pentium, motherboards have to be able to recognize the CPU without the pins so that they can run at the CPU's intended speed and provide proper voltage.