SUMMARY: A drop-dead-no-brainer-easy-as-pie-the-gods-must-be-crazy 33% overclocking notebook.

After mounting all the components and checking connections, I inserted the battery pack, hooked up the AC adapter and pressed the power button. The fans powered up, the screen showed a blinking cursor and stopped there.

Uh-oh..... What did I do wrong? I could not power it off, so I disconnected the AC and battery to shut it down. I re-checked all connections and tried again - same thing.

Crap - did I screw the pooch??

OK - trouble shooting 101 - reseat cards and try again - same deal. Next, remove everything but the essentials. The only extra was the WIFI card, so I removed it and tried again.

Success!

I called ASUS Notebook Support¹ and they informed me that only the Intel WIFI card is supported - others may or may not work. The card I used was a pull from another notebook and the ASUS did not like it at all.

The hard drive I used was a 40 GB IBM Deskstar - I thought it was empty, so when I saw the splash screen for W2000, I then remembered that I had used this drive as a short term backup when one of my desktop drives failed in my RAID mirror. It went through the usual "New Hardware Found" routine - the CD Driver disk that comes with the unit filled the bill and I was up and running.

The whole process, including reading the manual, took about three hours - this included lots of picture taking, so it slowed me down somewhat. I would be surprised if it took more than a morning to fully set up this notebook, including loading the OS and reading the manual (no real help on hardware setup, BTW.)

I had SiSandra on the drive, so I ran it to start to check things out. Hello - what's this?

I find it's running at 2.13 GHz, not 1.6 GHz.

I pick up the CPU box and confirm it's a Pentium 725 - 1.6 GHz, SL7EG. Hmmmm....

I load CPU Cool (a VERY nice notebook utility HERE) and confirm again that it's running at 2.13 GHz; I right-click My Computer and confirm that it is indeed a 1.6 GHz CPU.

I conclude that this is a 400 MHz part running at 533 MHz (16 * 100 = 1.6 GHz; 16 * 133 = 2.128 GHz). OK - how did this happen?? Let's take a look at the CPU area for some clues:

I noticed this little dipswitch marked "SW3" before and wondered about it - now I had a very strong hunch - this sets FSBs. A quick call to ASUS confirmed it.

This harkens back to some early ASUS motherboards that used dipswitch settings to set FSBs. In this case, it's up for 400 FSB and down for 533 FSB:

The Pentium M 725 is a GREAT overclocking chip - I will show some tests that I performed at both 1.6 and 2.13 GHz (a 33% overclock), and I have to say Intel gave us nice present. Considering that the 2.13 GHz part costs about $400 more than the 1.6, I think you get the drift of why I like this notebook a lot (if there are others that offer this feature, and I'm sure there are a few, drop me a line).

Folks, this is a drop-dead-no-brainer-easy-as-pie-the-gods-must-be-crazy situation. Longtime readers will appreciate the parallel to the Celeron 300.

Doing this on other notebooks might be a little messy - here's an example of the CPU pin-mod on a Dell 9300 HERE. Not only is getting to some notebook CPUs difficult, it also involves shorting out pins on the CPU - a mistake could be costly. Overall, this ASUS is much preferred.

This is one notebook that delivers a nice bonus - easy FSB overclocking. With low speed 400 MHz Pentium M CPUs capable of running trouble free at 533 MHz, flipping a dipswitch is a real plus. I'll report on performance and use testing shortly.

The ASUS Z71A is available from Directron.

¹I should note that I called three separate times and the longest wait I had was 10 minutes; I got speedy replies to my questions - not bad, although it is toll call to California.