A Closer Look

The box of the sample we recieved was a bit bruised when it arrived. The front is very classy in a minimalist kind of way but there's nothing there to catch the eye or the imagination of an undecided buyer who doesn't understand what lies within. Fortunately that back of the box was adorned with all the customary facts and info.

The bundled extras manage to be both comprehensive and sparse at the same time. There's all the documentation you could wish for which is great news for the less experienced user as all the features and installation routines covered in depth.

Also you get two IDE cables, two S-ATA cables and a floppy cable, an I/O shield, function key plastic overlay and transparent stickers for function key identification and a copy of InterVideo's WinCinema suite. Another nice inclusion is the motherboard features sticker which covers all the main board components and settings and cab be stuck in any convenient location, probably the back of your case side panel. Provided you don't change your motherboard and end up with a half inch wad of them this is a great idea and one that quite a few board manufacturers (DFI, Albatron etc.) are adopting.

 

Generally speaking the P4C800 Deluxe is a very clean and well arranged board. The fact it uses five rather than six PCI slots means ASUS were able to position the DIMM sockets so as the retention clips don't foul your AGP graphics card. Power connector placement is okay generally and although it's easy to moan about I think it's fair to say most board manufacturers understand where is and isn't a good place for them and if they put them in a less than perfect place it's been done for a reason.

The sheer size of the sink on the MCH (North Bridge) suggests ASUS may have been better considering an active cooling alternative. Depending on the style of CPU cooler you're using you may also find the North Bridge sink is close enough to make fitting and removal either difficult or even downright impossible.

Click for a larger image

 

The rather uncommon placement of the battery make for a lot of clutter around the DIMM sockets but not enough to be a serious concern. Changing the battery is probably going to involve whipping out a cable or two but when was the last time you kept a motherboard for lso long that the battery died on you?

 

AGP function are catered for with the inclusion of an AGP Pro slot. The AGP Pro design was introduced to boost the power available to high end AGP cards and is fully backward compatible with current AGP cards.

 

The IDE connector for IDE channel 3 has been turned on its side and placed at the board edge to free up some PCB acreage. I wonder if we'll ever see a double-decker version of this idea?

 

So far as hard-wired connectors go the P4C800 has just about all the bases covered. Along with the now customary Audio I/O sockets, four USB2.0/1.1 ports, PS/2 keyboard and mouse sockets, parallel and COM port comes a single IEEE 1394 (Firewire) port and a co-axial S/PDIF socket.

 

 

Onboard audio comes courtesy of the nalog Devices AD1985. The Analog Devices AD1985 is used to add analog and digital audio capabilities to computer motherboards by connecting directly to the AC'97 core logic chipset. By reusing existing system resources, this solution adds flexibility, improves sound quality. An interesting feature is the ability to sense which plugs you have lthough it's no longer a unique feature the AD1985 also supports "Jack Sensing" which detects the type of jack in each socket and if wrong warns you so and offers a solution.

 

 

 

 

3COM 3C940 brings with it extremely fast data transfer rates supporting 10/100/1000 BASE-T Ethernet

 

 

 

• Altitude: -300 to 3000 m (-984 to 9,836 ft) operating/storage
• Connectors, media: RJ-45; 10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T
  
• Data path, buffer memory: 32-bit 33/66 MHz PCI; 128 KB deep packet buffer
  
• Drivers: Microsoft Windows 2000/2000 Professional, XP Home/Professional, Win-64 XP, Me, 98 SE, Windows NT 4.0 Workstation; Novell NetWare 5.x/6.0; Linux 2.2/2.4/-64 (Red Hat, Caldera, TurboLinux, SUSE)
  
• Humidity (noncondensing): 10% to 90% operating; 5% to 95% storage
  
• Management: Supports WfM 2.0, ACPI 2.0, RWU over the bus, MIB II, DMI 1.0/2.0, PXE 2.1, EFI, BIS, SNMP
  
• Operating distances: 10BASE-T: Category 3, 4, 5, or 5e UTP up to 100 m (328 ft) 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T: Category 5 or 5e UTP up to 100 m (328 ft)
  
• Power requirements: 3.3 V, 2.5 V, and 1.5 V
  
• Processing offloads: TCP/UDP/IP checksum
  
• Setup, diagnostics utilities: EEPROM, cable testing; DOS utilities, GUI, EFI, 3Com Connection Assistant by Motive; 3Com Managed PC Boot Agent
  
• Standards conformance: PCI 2.2, PC2001, 802.3, 802.3u, 802.3ab, 802.3x, 802.3z, 802.1p Packet Prioritization, 802.1Q multiple VLANs (>16 subnets), 802.3ac VLAN tagging, efficient multicast control, Jumbo Frames, ANSI/TIA/EIA-568A
  

 

The VIA VT6307 is compliant with the latest IEEE 1394 standards with full 1394a P2000 support, and has an OHCI compliant programming interface with support for I2C EEPROMs and 4-Wire Serial ROMs. The VIA VT6307 has VIA and OHCI software driver support built into all recent Microsoft® Windows® operating systems.

 

Features

BIOS