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Asus also took a
seemingly well rounded chipset, like the i875P and tricked
things out a bit more. The P4C800 we tested is the
"Deluxe" edition and as such, Asus aimed high with extra
features and integration.
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Up
Close and Personal With The Asus P4C800 |
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Canterwood with Asus attitude |
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Click
images for full view
The board
itself, like the Abit board, is a pleasure to behold (at
least if you're the PC-Geek type like us here) and the
layout is also immaculate. Like the IC7-G, the P4C800
also has its power connectors at the edge of the backside of
the PCB, out of the way of the CPU socket and chipset
heat-sink. Asus went with a very large and sturdy
aluminum sink on the Northbridge and it does an excellent
job of conducting heat away from the i875P chip underneath.
If only there was a small fan attached to the top, this
solution would have been perfect. But alas, there
aren't many things in life that are perfect however, and we
do prefer this sink assembly slightly more than the IC7-G's
rather smallish HSF. Asus also dropped in an
additional SATA RAID controller but decided to work with the
Promise/Marvell PDC20378 chip. We prefer the Silicon
Image chip used on the Abit board, for its slight
performance advantage but this is pretty much a toss up.
The Promise chip also does offer support for an extra ATA133
channel on this board, for a total of 3 ATA100/133 channels,
including the two off of the ICH5 Southbridge.
The P4C800 GigE
LAN solution is driven by the 3Com/Marvell controller.
We're not sure how this technology plays in with Intel's
"CSA" interface for the i875P but we assume, they've
licensed the bus technology out versus this sitting on the
PCI bus. We need to confirm this but it wouldn't make
sense to go with a third party chip like this, unless it
could take advantage of this key architectural feature for
the i875P chipset. We didn't specifically test the
performance of the LAN interfaces on these boards but the
3Com solution here performed very well and was pretty snappy
over a 100Mb connection. Asus also offers a rear
channel output with their ADI SoundMax 6 channel audio
solution but used an interesting RCA jack instead and there
is no SPDIF jack or back-plate included. Finally, the
P4C800 bundle is surprisingly skimpy, when you consider this
is a "Deluxe" version package that we tested. Asus
only offered 2 SATA cables, two standard ATA cables, a back
trim plate and a driver/utilities CD, in addition to the
User's and "Getting Started" manuals. There are no
SATA Power cables and no additional USB2.0 connector plates,
like were included with the Abit bundle. In short, the
on board features of the P4C800 are certainly "deluxe" but
the bundle is "economy".
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Asus P4C800 BIOS Setup |
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AMI, unfortunately |
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Click
images for full view
When we first
fired up the P4C800, our graphics card was not synching up
with our 20" Dell flat panel, that we use for testing.
The screen would flicker in and out, and although the image
was there, it wouldn't hold a synch lock long enough for us
to navigate the BIOS menus, when driven through a standard
VGA input. The only mode that worked correctly was with DVI
on the flat panel...and then it dawned on us. This
board uses an AMI BIOS that sends a weird 56Hz frequency
request to the VGA card that a few flat panel monitors may
have an issue with, since it is below the standard 60Hz
frequency for LCD displays. Why Asus elected to go
with an AMI BIOS instead of the industry default Award BIOS,
is beyond us. Once we figured out what the problem was
with respect to the VGA input on our flat panel, we switched
to DVI and everything worked well. However, some users
may or may not struggle with this.
Other than that,
the BIOS options are plentiful with this AMI setup.
You can adjust CPU, Memory and AGP bus speeds, as well as
set voltages for each. However, the board only allows
up to a 1.7V CPU core voltage, 1.6V with a funky +.1V
"offset" feature. Then there are the usual DRAM timing
control settings, except this BIOS also allows adjustment of
DRAM burst length as well. All told, the AMI BIOS used
in the P4C800 is fairly feature rich but a little less user
friendly than the IC7-G's Award BIOS with Abit's "Softmenu".
Additionally, those interested in extreme overclocking, may
find themselves with out the needed voltage boost, above and
beyond 1.7V.
Test Setup, Overclocking and Initial Numbers |