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ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe: New ASUS Mainboard on Old i865PE Chipset (page 4)

Category: Mainboards

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 06/06/2004 | 03:29 PM ]

Thanks to the ICH5R South Bridge chip employed in the P4P800-E Deluxe, the mainboard supports eight USB 2.0 ports, two Parallel ATA/100 channels (Intel’s chipsets don’t support the ATA/133 mode) and two SerialATA ports with an option of creating a RAID array of level 0 or 1. Four USB 2.0 ports are found at the mainboard’s connections panel and the remaining four are available as onboard pin-connectors. The bracket for the back panel of the system case that you get with the mainboard helps to output two onboard ports, whereas the other pair is supposed to be attached to connectors on the system case (if you’ve got such a case).

The rest of the mainboard’s capabilities, quite wide-reaching, are realized with additional controllers, which make the ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe into a top-end product.

First of all, I’d like to say a few words about the extra ATA RAID controller Promise PDC20378 that supports RAID 0, 1 and 0+1. Thanks to this controller, the mainboard supports an additional pair of SATA-150 channels and one ATA/133 port. Overall, you can attach as many as 10 drives to the P4P800-E Deluxe: four with the SerialATA interface and six with the Parallel ATA interface. You may remember that the older version, the P4P800 Deluxe, used another RAID controller, manufactured by VIA Technologies. The new chip increases the number of SATA connections in the first hand, since the VIA chip didn’t support this interface at all. Overall, the SerialATA interface is gaining its ground and, for example, the upcoming Alderwood and Grantsdale will only support one Parallel ATA channel.

Another chip from VIA Technologies, the VT6307 controller, remained onboard, being responsible for two IEEE1394 ports. One port is nestled at the back panel of the mainboard and the other is onboard – you can output it through a bracket included with the P4P800-E Deluxe.

The network controller is new. Instead of the Marvell 3C940 chip the P4P800 uses, the P4P800-E Deluxe features the Marvell 88E8001 controller.

Its formal characteristics are the same as the previous chip had. That is, it connects to the PCI bus, provides Gigabit Ethernet and supports the exclusive Virtual Cable Tester technology. In practice, however, this chip is much better, especially as concerns CPU load. Thus, the networking capabilities of the P4P800-E Deluxe nearly match those of the much more expensive i875P-based P4C800-E Deluxe which uses Intel’s controller attached to the CSA bus. To prove the point, I’d like to present you the test results of the network controller of the P4P800-E Deluxe in PassMark Advanced Network Test. I compare the numbers with the results of the P4C800-E Deluxe (I used a server with a Gigabit Ethernet Intel 82545 card connected across the 64-bit PCI interface).

As you see, the use of the CSA bus allows the Intel 82547 controller to achieve a higher average data-transfer rate, but both controllers put a similar small load on the central processor. The user of the P4P800-E Deluxe also receives a bonus in the way of Virtual Cable Tester technology which can detect cable flaws with a good degree of accuracy.