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- Date:
- Friday , October 04, 2002
- Author:
- Steve Lynch
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
ASUS P4S8X
If you are in the mood for AGP8X, DDR333, and SATA, the guys at Asus have put together a Pentium 4 mainboard that may be to your liking.
Board Layout (cont.):
We pointed out the bad ATX header placement, and as you can see for yourself, once installed in your case, getting your hands in to remove the power cable or plug & unplug fans can be a serious pain. The 12v header required on Pentium4 mainboards is located to the lower left of the socket, next to the "EZ Plug" that allows older PSUs to be used on a P4 board without the extra 12v lead. A very good idea on ASUS's part.
DDR Memory slots are located very close to the AGP slot, which is too common among mainboards lately, despite the fact that manufacturers know that it causes problems installing or removing RAM once the video card is installed.
Serial ATA offers transfer rates of 150mb/sec thanks to the Promise SATA150 chip. Two Serial ATA headers are present in addition to the regular ATA133 IDE headers. There is one SATA header above the Promise PDC20376 chip and one below. Each serial ATA header supports only a single drive though. There is also a third IDE channel available that supports a single parallel hard drive that can be used instead of the serial ATA connections. Something to keep in mind with this set up is that either the IDE or SATA can be used but not both at the same time.
Two SATA cables are included with the mainboard, although no ATA to SATA hard drive adapters were. Considering Serial ATA drives aren’t currently available on the market yet, it would have been a plus to include at least one adapter. As you can see, the small red serial cables are extremely small in comparison to a standard flat 80-pin hard drive cable.
The back panel of the P4S8X holds the familiar mouse / keyboard / parallel / serial / USB combination we have grown so accustomed to over the years with the small addition of a single Firewire port. I have been predicting that over time you will see less and less of the current configuration, as the standard will most likely become a legacy free design ( like the MAX Series of boards we tested here) but we are certainly looking at a while before that happens.
The sound on the P4S8X is handled via the C-Media 9739 chip, which provides fairly good 6-channel audio that can satisfy most gamers and people just short of the true audio enthusiasts.
The P4S8X does not use an active cooler on the SiS648, just a passive heatsink that seems to get the job done. A quick check under the heat sink reveals an ample amount of thermal compound, something that is often overlooked by manufactures these days. As far as the SiS963 south bridge goes, it is by far one of the most full featured south bridges around rivaling that of an nForce MCP in sheer amount of quality features.
The Realtek chip, located just to the left of the AGP warning light, handles all the LAN requirements surprisingly well, saving you the cost of an aftermarket NIC. Headers for Smart Card readers, IR Connections and game ports are all added to the board as well.
BIOS:
The BIOS is standard Award fare, with most all the features one could want. Overclocking features like CPU voltage adjustments are available from 1.55v to 1.825v, bus speeds up to 166MHz in one MHz increments also made it onto this board as well.
The memory adjustments are rather straightforward as pre-set dividers in the BIOS determine your choices for DDR memory settings. This means that if you chose a 133MHz bus, the only memory speeds available to you will be 133 / 166 / 200, there are no in between settings. This makes things a bit delicate at higher bus speeds above 150MHz. What this means is that if you run your system at 150MHz FSB, the only speeds available to you are 150 / 187 / 225.
AGP voltage can be adjusted up to 1.7v. The DDR voltage can go up to 2.7v. The BIOS supports the new 8X AGP cards, meaning the mainboard automatically detects whether or not your video card supports the 8X AGP specification. If your video card supports 8X AGP, your options will be 4X and 8X. If not, the standard 1X/2X/4X will only be available.