For those, who did not acquire an i845PE-based mainboard last year and for those, who do not feel like getting a dual-channel solution on i865 or i875P this year as well, ASUS announced its P4PE-X mainboard today. Another low-cost Socket 478 solution from X-series brings us fewer capabilities than the original P4PE revealed last year, however, the product may still appear competitive one due to its pricing and official support of 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus.

• Supports Socket 478 Pentium 4 / Celeron processors with 400/533/800MHz FSB with up to 3.20GHz clock-speed;
• Can take advantage of the CPUs with the Hyper-Threading technology enabled;
• i845PE chipset, including i82845PE MCH and i82801DA ICH4;
• 3 DIMM slots for up to 2GB of PC1600, PC2100, PC2700;
• 6 PCI and 1 AGP 4x slot;
• 2-channel ATA-100/66/33 integrated controller;
• 4 USB 2.0 ports;
• 10/100Mbit/s Ethernet adapter from Broadcom;
• ADI1980 6-channel audio solution with SPDIF support;
• Additional functions, including technologies like CrashFree BIOS, MyLogo, EZ Flash, JumperFree, C.P.R (CPU Parameter Recall) and SFS (Stepless Frequency Selection);
• Overclocking functions, including Vcore, Vmem and Vagp adjusting and so on;
• ATX Form Factor.

As you see, this is just a very ordinary mainboard without Serial ATA-150, AGP 8x, FireWire and other juicy features you may demand from a ’03 mainboard. Basically speaking, you really should not expect more from a low-cost mainboard these days, at least, it supports Intel Pentium 4 “Northwood” CPUs up to 3.20GHz, this should be enough for any low-cost PC.