Mainboard Asus TX97
This board is some kind of special fellow. It doesn’t bother having SIMM sockets anymore, which is probably the reason why it’s usually shipped with one Asus 32 MB SDRAM DIMM. There is a version (TX97-E) that will allow you to use your old 72 pin SIMM EDO or FPM, but I haven’t received that one for testing, neither the ATX versions. It comes with a nice gimmick, which enables you to monitor the CPU and board temperature, the CPU fan function (that’s why it comes with its own heatsink/fan) and the board’s voltages. You can either check these values in the BIOS setup menu under ‘Power management’ or via the Intel LDCM software from Win95, NT and over the network, that comes with the board on a CD.
The performance of the TX97 is very good, especially since its latest BIOS release 1.04. It’s one of the fastest Socket 7 boards available. However there’s one big let down, it does not support 83 MHz bus speed and rumors say that this is due to Asus close relationship to Intel. My personal opinion is to prefer an board that’s a little slower but offering 83 MHz support and I don’t really understand why Asus went off the 83 MHz idea, which was first introduced by themselves.
The TX97 comes with 4 PCI, 4 ISA, 3 DIMM slots, supporting all current Socket 7 CPUs, for the AMD K6 233 you can jumper 3.1 V, it doesn’t have ECC support, neither does it cache more than 64 MB of RAM, due to the TX chipset. It supports SDRAM, Ultra-DMA and FPM or EDO in case you can get them in form of DIMMs. It has a switching voltage regulator.[X]