PCB Design

In spite of the numerous additional controllers, the ASUS engineering team found a way to place them all neatly on a PCB of the standard ATX form-factor (245mm depth). Overall, the wiring layout of the P4P800-E Deluxe is similar to that of previous ASUS P4P800 Deluxe boards, although those extra controllers still made some changes necessary.

The CPU voltage regulator module is three-channel, like in the previous version of the product.

Our stress-testing of the board using a Prescott of the most power-hungry C0 stepping, overclocked to 3.6GHz, revealed no stability-related problems, so the CPU power module is very satisfactory.

The main ATX power connector is situated before the DIMM slots and causes no problems, but the 12v additional connector has been moved to behind the chipset’s North Bridge and the attached 12v power cable hangs over the CPU cooler, hindering airflows.

The placement of other connectors can hardly be called optimal. The Parallel ATA slots of the South Bridge and the FDD slot are placed in front of the DIMM plugs, while many other connectors are located in front of the PCI slots. As a result, you may run into troubles installing long expansion cards. The pin-connectors for additional USB ports are right before the third PCI slot – that’s no good at all. The SATA and PATA connectors of the Promise PDC20378 controller are scattered before the PCI slots in the same careless manner. It seems like the engineers were trying to save their time and just redesigned a portion of the PCB for the new Promise PDC20378, but left the rest of the PCB alone, without bothering about an optimal placement of the connectors.

The P4P800-E Deluxe inherited the most dangerous design problem from its predecessor. Although it has only five PCI slots, the AGP slot is placed very close to DIMM slots, and the installed graphics card will hinder installation or extraction of memory modules. Moreover, you should be careful when installing a graphics card into the AGP slot because you can accidentally brush against the memory slot with the card.

The number of PCI slots has been reduced to five, and ASUS used this fact to clear space to the left of the AGP slot. This is right since you very seldom use the PCI slot closest to the AGP. It is either left free for air to get to the graphics card or cannot be used at all because of the graphics card’s cooling system.

Otherwise, the PCB design has no evident drawbacks. The Clear CMOS jumper can be accessed easily; the North Bridge has a passive heatsink on.

The mainboard’s connections panel peeps out of the system case with two traditional PS/2 ports, one serial and one parallel port, with six audio jacks, coaxial and optical SPDIF outputs, four High-Speed USB ports, one IEEE1394 output and a network RJ-45 connector. The second COM port is realized as an onboard pin-connector.