865PE/875P Motherboard Roundup June 2003 - Part 1: 20-way Shootout

ASUS P4C800 Deluxe

One of the most notable attributes of the P4C800 Deluxe is its IDE/Serial ATA drive support. As usual there are the standard IDE connectors, dubbed the Primary and Secondary IDE connectors, which support two channels each and therefore up to four IDE drives total. There's one additional IDE connector powered by the Promise PDC20378 controller. This specific Promise controller supports just two IDE channels, meaning a max of two hard drives (no optical drives allowed) can be connected. This same Promise PDC20378 controller also powers two Serial ATA connectors (not the two ICH5-bound Serial ATA connectors), which allows users to connect one SATA drive to each connector. All in all you should be able to connect four SATA and six IDE drives to this motherboard, though we can't imagine what desktop user would have the need for ten drives in one case as the heat, noise, and maintenance required would be quite severe. Though we have to admit, the P4C800 Deluxe's drive capability is perfect for small database workstations/servers and the like.

Not surprisingly the ASUS P4C800 Deluxe contains excellent overclocking options such as a Vcore available as high as 1.950V, VDIMM up to 2.85V in 0.5V increments and a FSB ceiling of 400MHz. All these options make it exceedingly easy for overclockers to take advantage of the P4C800 Deluxe's tremendous FSB overclocking ability. In fact, if you were to replace the P4C800 Deluxe's passive North Bridge heatsink with a good active cooling solution you'll probably be able to squeeze a good 290MHz FSB out of this motherboard. We would never have guessed 6 months ago that 300MHz FSB (1.2GHz effective) frequencies would be possible by summer.

Some of the negative aspects the P4C800 Deluxe carries are its lack of basic high-end features like ICH5R and CSA Gigabit LAN that all top-of-the-line 875P Pentium 4 motherboards should carry. Coincidently enough ASUS has just released a new version of the P4C800 Deluxe, dubbed the P4C800-E Deluxe. This new revision corrects some of the mistakes ASUS made with the original 875P revision we examined last April and are examining again today. The E revision tacks on native RAID support and CSA support, almost certainly because there has been demand for it. However the price premium being asked for the P4C800-E Deluxe simply isn't worth it when compared to other high-end motherboards on the market such as ABIT's IS7-G/IC7-G, Soyo's P4I875P DRAGON 2, Gigabyte's 8KNXP, and AOpen's AX4C Max.