90's PC Builder? Here's Four Classic ASUS Motherboards!

As part of our giveaway to celebrate ASUS reaching 500 million motherboard sales, we've dug out four classic ASUS motherboards! If you were building PCs in the 90's, please share your memories in our the discussion thread and stroll down memory lane with us!

 1994: ASUS PCI/I-486SV2

• Socket 3
• 486DX CPU support
• Intel 420ZX chipset

Back before Intel launched even its famous Pentium branding that still exists today, Socket 3 boards supported the 4th generation x86 CPUs, in flavors of SX and DX (and various Overdrive upgrades). The 'Saturn II' chipset (ZX) class shown below was actually last during the 486 generation, adding the PCI 2.1 support. Featuring 72-pin SIMM memory (rather than 30-pin) you had to install in pairs (so we came full circle with dual-channel DDR memory in 2006) and even onboard 50-pin SCSI in addition to the 3-chip Intel 420ZX chipset, this was a high-end motherboard of the time. The baby AT shape (and power connector) predates the tall and thin ATX motherboards you'll see today.

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1996 - ASUS P55T2P4D

• Dual Socket 5
• Dual Pentium CPU support
• Intel 430HX chipset

Another high-end/workstation motherboard, the P55T2P4D supported dual Pentium CPUs, although the multi-core support in Windows NT at the time was a limited implementation (I'm not familiar with Linux/Unix from this era sorry). As you can see below, the full AT format motherboard was huge! The brown slot below the CPU sockets was for the shared L2 cache, far before it was integrated inside the CPU silicon. There's several PCI 2.1 slots, along with an early ASUS innovation: the media bus extension that combined PCI graphics and ISA sound on a single card to add great value, in addition to the ISA (black) and E-ISA (brown) slots.

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1997 - ASUS XP5NP5

• Socket 8
• Pentium Pro CPU support
• Intel 440FX chipset

A year later Intel launched it's first CPU targeted specifically at servers and workstations, splitting consumer and professional series into what would eventually become Pentium and Xeon. The Pentium Pro had a unique Socket 8, where the wide shape allowed space for the CPU core and cache chip to sit next to each other. The cost of this design was significant for the time, which is why it was reserved for the most expensive and performance demanding platform; it was also precursor to the familiar Xeon.

On the XP5NP5 itself we now see an 20-pin ATX power connector and a series of rear IO connectors integrated on the board. Previously these would have been on a ISA card. The motherboard shape with CPU at the top is something like where we're used to seeing, although it's not strictly ATX.. yet. Again, ASUS' media bus is an integrated extension of the last PCI slot.

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1999 - ASUS P3B Series

• Slot 1
• Pentium II CPU support
• Intel 440BX chipset

Proceeded by the popular P2B series (sorry we couldn't find one to photograph as well), the P3B series broke ground with AGP for graphics and fast SDR DIMMs. With a splash of pink on the parallel port and a green heatsink on the 440BX northbridge, things are starting to look a little more modern in a traditional ATX layout. There's also innovations like onboard DIP switches for easy tweaking/overclocking and a standby power LED too!

We even found a Pentium II to fit - and the 16 year old board still boots!

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