Contents
The P3B-F came in a cardboard box that is characteristic of hardware packaging, which went to say that eye-catching colours and large wordings were abound on the surface. Not that I want to gripe, but my room is starting to look like Hardware Erotica with the myriad of similarly decorated hardware and software boxes abound. Anyhow, here were the goods which came with the pretty box :

• The ASUS P3B-F with Universal Retention Mechanism.

• Ribbon cable for master and slave IDE drives.

• Ribbon cable for 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives each.

• A bag of spare jumper caps.

• A support CD with drivers and utilities.

• A User's Manual.

The P3B-F motherboard comes in three flavours. You can either get the variation with 5 PCI slots and 2 ISA slots or one which houses 6 PCI slots and a shared ISA slot or one which has purely 6 PCI slots. The one with 6 PCI slots and a shared ISA slot was used for this review. Noticeable physical first impressions of the board are the four DIMM memory slots, an onboard LED and a smaller form factor with neater component layout compared to the BX6-2 but with a rather congested AGP slot layout. Credit must go to ASUS for having a user's manual that is well-written and organised. Before I go on to the installation, it sufficed to say at this stage that the P3B-F is aesthetically more pleasing than the BX6-2.

The ASUS P3B-F. Click to Enlarge