There are people who buy stylish clothing in order to look well. There are those, who buy jewellery or other luxury devices so that to attract attention to themselves. There are also those, who constantly upgrade their personal computers, who modify them and want them to become as fast and stylish device as possible. This French site discovered that ASUS plans soon to launch their mainboard for those, who love to feel the ecstatically beautiful device inside their PC cases: ASUS P4PE “Black Pearl”.

The mainboard itself is a well-known ASUS P4PE based on Intel’s 845PE core-logic. It is equipped with a stylish box, a manual, a CD, rounded FDD and HDD cables and an a 32MB flash-disk.

Although you probably know the specs of this mainboard, as the P4PE is a popular one, I will remind them to you:

• Supports Socket 478 Pentium 4 / Celeron processors with 400/533MHz FSB with 3.06GHz clock-speed and above;
• 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 PC2100 or PC2700 (533MHz FSB) / PC1600 or PC2100 (400MHz FSB) DDR SDRAM memory.
• 6 PCI, including one ASUS BlueMagic slot and 1 AGP 4x slot;
• 2-channel ATA-100/66/33 integrated controller;
• Serial ATA-150/ATA-133 RAID controller from Promise, supporting two Serial ATA ports and one ATA-133 port;
• 4 USB 2.0 ports;
• IEEE1394 controller from Intel’s beloved VIA Technologies. Offers 2 FireWire ports;
• 10/100/1000Mbit/s Ethernet adapter from Broadcom;
• ADI1980 6-channel audio solution with SPDIF support;
• Lots of additional functions, including technologies like Power Loss Restart, ASUS JumperFree, ASUS EZ Plug, ASUS POST Reporter, AGP Warning LED, ASUS Q-Fan, as well as brand new additions like CrashFree BIOS, My Logo2 and ASUS EZ Flash;
• Overclocking functions, including Vcore, Vmem and Vagp adjusting, C.P.R. (CPU Parameter Recall) technology, FSB settings from 100 to 200MHz with 1MHz step. Allows to set FSB:DDR dividers and independently clock PCI and AGP busses;
• ATX Form Factor.

The novelty is quite impressive for today, however, it definitely lacks a lot of upgrade features and cannot boast with performance offered by E7205 or i850E powered solutions. Well, the style costs a fortune and also the lack of practically useful features.

ASUS P4PE “Black Pearl” are said to appear really soon.