Let's take a look first at the "pieces" of the puzzle, and then see just how they all work together. 

The Asus CUSL2 mainboard is an extremely nice board. Built around the Intel i815 chipset, rather than the venerable BX, the board supports some key features that make it a good choice for an overclocked system, and perhaps a better choice that the BX. The board support AGP 4x transfers, and includes an AGP-Pro slot. Two onboard CNR slots provide OEM's with the ability to cheaply add a modem and network interface to the card. It also supports 4-USB connectors, and even has a built in USB Hub output to bring total USB device support to 7 devices. Of course it also supports the new ATA-100 IDE interface, helping to speed along file transfers on newer ATA-100 complaint hard drives as well. As in all i815 boards, this one includes on board VGA as well. Unless your'e going the ultra cheap route, or are setting up a vanilla workstation, this isn't going to matter to anybody. Thankfully turning off the onboard video takes just a little BIOS setting. These are nice enough features,  but what are we here for? Overclocking, yes? mmmkay! ;)

The Asus CUSL2 uses a new "Phoenix influenced" Award BIOS layout, and is for the purposes of overclocking totally jumper free. The board allows FSB to be changed in 1mhz increments from 66-97mhz, 100-132mhz, and 135-200mhz! The board has a "Safe Mode" feature that will bring you down to 66mhz FSB and back to the advanced functions area of the BIOS if a particular speed fails to POST. A lot easier than clearing the CMOS to recover from a FSB blunder.  The i815 chipset on the board natively support PC133 memory, and (and this is the clincher) allows standard PCI/AGP bus timings when running at 133FSB. Unlike the BX chipset, the i815 uses a 1/2 divisor for AGP bus speed when running at 133FSB, which can eliminate AGP bus speed as a potential problem when overclocking a cpu beyond 100mhz FSB. At 133FSB on a BX chipset board, AGP is clocked at 88mhz, making the process of overclocking a BX chipset board to, and beyond that FSB level, considerably more difficult. About the only caveat with the board is the i815's slightly inferior system memory bandwidth, when compared to a BX chipset board. Thankfully, manufacturers have been tinkering with the i815 board for a while now, and the bandwidth differences are significantly reduced, to the point of being only a minor issue. I'd have to say in my view, the positives of this board far outweigh that one little negative. Asus has an admirable and enviable reputation in the board business, and it's obvious to me that the CUSL2 is another feather in their cap. Perhaps this will signify the beginning of a trend towards feature-rich, overclocker friendly i815's from other manufacturers. Be that as it may, let's go take a look at the rest of the goodies.

Next page: The RAM & CPU

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