Here are two bits of information I thought might be of interest the PCBUILD
community:

1: Intel 810 Chipset and P III incompatibility.

Intels 810 chipset was originally designed for the low end market (Celeron /
Socket 370), but it seems like a few of the more inventive board
manufacturers took a few liberties and produced 810 boards for slot 1
systems. Not a bad idea you might think. The problem is Intel never checked
the chipset for PIII compatibility. The end result is that some of the
PIII's commands i.e. MASKMOVQ with non-alligned data will cause the PIII to
do reboot(error E42). Intel assures that this command occurs rarely and they
are planning to correct this mistake in the A3 stepping of the 810 chipset.
Some of you planning to use this chipset with a PIII might want to wait till
the A3 stepping comes out in August.

2: Forged ASUS boards

ASUS has published a list of 4000 serial numbers of forged P2B and P2B-F
boards (http://www.asuscom.de). They got them from a dealer with some second
thoughts. Some of the ways to tell if your board is a forgery:

1) 'Made in China' sticker. ASUS does not produce in China. Some dealers
scratch off the sticker but you can see patches of glue over the 'Made in
Taiwan' etchings.

2) A Diode (D4 on the P2B, D8 on the P2B-F) between the Slot 1 and the
Parallel Port connector on a lot of the forged mobos is round, on the real
ones it is always square.

3) The forged P2Bs have been found with the Rev. 1.02, 1.04 and 1.10.
Forgeries of the rev. 1.12 have not been found yet. All original and forged
P2B-Fs have the rev. 1.0.

According to ASUS these boards are not nearly as stable as the originals.

Source: C't magazine

--
Rick S.

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