The Boards In Detail
All of the motherboards presented in this preview are still in the beta testing stage. Several motherboards evidenced problems with the ATi Radeon 9700 Pro. However, during the test, we received BIOS updates from the manufacturers that eliminated this bug. This preview focuses more on features and less on performance differences between the individual test candidates. THG will only publish a full comparison with benchmarks once the boards are released in their final version.
One thing is already clear: the memory speed is connected synchronously with the front side bus of the CPU from the E7X05 chipset. This prevents the DDR333 memory from being run without overclocking. In the overclocking mode, the FSB has to be boosted to 166 MHz to get optimum performance from the DDR333 SDRAM.
Asus P4G8X
Asus opens the gate for the P4G8X. The board has five PCI slots. The AGP slot has a Pro50 version provided with an additional power supply. Onboard, you will find a 1 GB/second connection. In addition to the ATA100 interface, the user has two serial ATA boxes. There is no fan on the E7205 Northbridge; only a passive cooling unit is used. Four USB 2.0 ports are provided internally. Two additional ports are available externally. Included in the functions is AC97 sound.
Packaging of Asus P4G8X
In addition to the ATX slot bracket, two ATA/ 100 ribbon cables and one floppy cable are included. The two serial ATA cables are the red ones.
In addition to the manuals, Asus provides the chipset driver CD on which there are some additional practical utilities. The user also gets a software bonus, the Gold Version Intervideo WinCinema.
