Asus P4P800-E Deluxe (i865PE Springdale)
Performance
I took Abit IC7-MAX3 (i875 Canterwood), as well as P4S800D-E (SiS 655TX) as contenders to our board in question. We'll be running two test sessions: in the first, the settings were standard, and in the second session we set the "Performance Mode" to "Aggressive" (thus allow the board to optimize the latency timings), and the "Memory Acceleration Mode" to "Enable" (this will result in the "PAT" activation, or "Hyper Path" as Asus representatives prefer to say :).
In our test configuration, we used the following hardware:
| Test configuration |
| Processor |
Intel Pentium 4 3.2E (Prescott - C)
|
| Cooler |
Zalman 7000Cu
|
| Video card |
Asus Radeon 9800XT(4458) (Ati 9800XT chip) |
| Sound card |
Creative Live 5.1 |
| HDD |
IBM DTLA 307030 30Gb |
| Memory |
2x256 MB PC3200 DDR SDRAM TwinX, made by Corsair (latency timings: 2-3-6-3) |
| Case |
Inwin506 with PowerMan 300W power supply unit |
| OS |
Windows XP SP1 |
Let's first take a look at the results of synthetic benchmarks.
Now on to the gaming benchmarks.
It is easy to see that enabled PAT gives quite an essential performance boost, which allows even the i865PE-based board leaving the pretty fast i875P-based motherboard behind. There is nothing to be surprised about that here: the whole line i875P\i865PE\i865P is manufactured from the same wafers. At the production stage, some small changes responsible for enabling/disabling some functions like support for ECC, PAT, FSB800 MHz bus etc. are introduced to the chips.
Moreover, to enable the PAT no special RAM type is required - the standard DDR400 will do. But to set the "Memory Acceleration Mode" to "Enable", a high-quality memory is a must. In fact, again you can get by with a standard DDR400 module, but with the Vmem slightly raised.
Final Words
 Asus P4P800-E is one of most multifunctional motherboards to date. It offers wide expansion options (4 channels of SerialATA with support for RAID, Gigabit Ethernet, IDE/RAID controller). Besides, the board supports some unique functionalities today: 8-channel integrated audio and support for the WiFi module (which adds $15 to the total cost of the board). Note also the rich set of Asus' own technologies: Q-Fan, POST Reporter, CrashFree BIOS 2, Ai Net and Ai Audio.
Another plus of P4P800-E is its quite sound price, which is about $125 as per www.price.ru. With this money, the user gets an abundant package bundle, additionally to the board itself (almost all the required cables).
As regards the overclocking, the board is not a top reference. Although the voltage adjustment ranges (on the processor, memory) are no worse than in other i865PE/i875P motherboards, this board does not allow to make the most of it (290 MHz of possible 300 MHz :).
And lastly: the operation speed of the board is at a very high level. In fact, buying a P4P800-E, the user gets a guaranteed way to enable the PAT, and thus attain the performance level of i875P-based motherboards.
Conclusion
Pros:
- Very high performance and stability;
- Additional IDE-RAID controller;
- Support for SerialATA (4 channels with RAID functions);
- Integrated 8-channel audio and LAN (Gigabit Ethernet);
- Support for USB2.0 (8 ports) and IEEE-1394 (Firewire, 2 ports);
- Rich package bundle and sound price;
- Support for the WiFi wireless communication (the module is shipped as a bundle item);
- A wide selection Asus' own technologies (Q-Fan; CrashFree BIOS 2 etc.);
- New technologies: AI Net and AI Audio; Instant Music;
- Powerful overclocking tools.
Cons:
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