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Well for one thing the PCB is really nothing to write home about as it comes in the standard color, no cool black, silver or other cool color, which is just for looks but hey that is eye candy when building a custom system that has a see through window in the enclosure. The layout of the board is on par with that of the Intel products Canterwood design albeit there are some small differences in the location of a few of the connectors. Like the Intel board the primary/secondary IDE connectors and the 1.44 floppy connector are very close together which is kind of a dual edged sword as being close together makes your cable mess less noticeable in a built system, but it also makes it hard to work with when installed inside of the case.
There are adequate fan headers around the ZIF Socket to insure the CPU and case fan have a place to plug into as well as an additional header for your front case fan to connect to having enough headers should never become an issue with the P4C800. Does the AGP card installed block a memory slot or two? Yes but that is seemingly the design on most boards and has become quietly a moot issue for most users who have adapted to removing the VGA card in order to access their memory slots. The rest of the board is done within reason and should offer the user no noteworthy ergonomic transgressions to get in their way of installing and setting up the board.
The P4C800 is based around the new Canterwood chipset; the so called crème de la crème of Intel's latest entry into the P4 platform, which was debuted a few weeks back and features P.A.T, Performance Acceleration Technology as well as Hyper-Threading. The 875P (and the 865 line of chipsets) offer three other key features that have been lacking in mainstream Intel chipsets: Serial ATA support, support for an 800MHz CPU front-side bus interface and a working AGP 8X interface. The board supports Dual-Channel memory via its four DIMM slots and can support up to 4GB of DDR400 SDRAM. Dual-channel DDR technology doubles the bandwidth of your system memory and can increase the system performance. System bottlenecks are eliminated with faster architecture and peak bandwidths of up to 6.4GB/s.
There is support for up to 10 IDE drives (4 SATA, 4 IDE, 2 ATA133), RAID 0/1, on the P4C800 Deluxe, but ASUS went in for not using the ICH5-R due to its current limitations as far as RAID array options and chose to use the Promise 20378 RAID controller which supports RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 and decided enthusiasts would like the Multiple RAID options of the Promise in lieu of Intel's ICH5-R Mode 0 only features. Multi-RAID enables users to build a RAID array with any 2, 3 or 4 of the ports. With this unique multi-RAID function, RAID 0 and RAID 1 array can co-exist at the same time. This is a pretty good feature as you can now have the speed of MODE 0 or Striped ARRAY with the continuous backup features of the MODE 1 or Mirroring ARRAY for maximum flexibility.
Featuring Gigabit LAN via the on-board 3COM 3C940 controller the controller is equipped with a unique net-diagnosing utility VCT (Virtual Cable Tester). The controller intelligently detects net connection status up to 100 meters from a remote location and reports the distance of the bad signal in the cable. I did not get a chance to test this feature as my cable works and bad cables around here have a way of disappearing as to abate flashing tempers, but if one was to assume for instance it does work then it should let you know where the problem is located in the cable for up to 100 meters, which would be cool if you can just cut the cable or make another one yourself. Most people just buy another cable in any case so how viable this feature will be the jury is still out on, but it is a good example of R&D exploring new technology. The LAN is compatible with all former 10/100/1000 BASE-T Ethernet environments so compatibility should never become a problem.
There are five PCI slots and an AGP Pro/ 8X/ 4X (0.8V, 1.5V only) slot to be found on the P4C800 along with support for up to eight USB 2.0 ports and FireWire support via the VIA 1394 Controller, which supports 2 x 1394 ports. Four USB 2.0 connectors and one IEEE 1394 connector are located on the rear I/O as well as the sound connections both digital and analog. Four more USB 2.0 and an additional IEEE 1394 connector can be attached via cables that plug into headers located on the motherboard that take up a slot on the back of your case. All the normal suspects are also available on the rear I/O such as your PS2 keyboard/mouse inputs as well as a parallel or what I call old school printer connector and last and maybe just least a even older school COM port.
Sound is provided by the ADI AD1985 SoundMAX 6-channel CODEC that features Audio Sensing and Enumeration Technology support as well as an S/PDIF out interface for clear digital sound reproduction. Within the Windows environment SoundMAX 4.0 features smart auto-sensing for helping correctly connect your speakers as well as a very user friendly GUI that helps to custom tailor your audio hardware options. ADI has a lead in the market as far as embedded audio goes as the SoundMAX package includes support for all the latest Direct Sound and A3D, EAX audio extensions that make your gaming environment a much more intense experience. The interface GUI that is offered is easy to comprehend and navigate making for a simple matter of custom setting your audio hardware options. A far as features go his about wraps up what the board has to offer hardware wise, there are some additional BIOS options which I will discuss in the next section of the review so read on folks. Contents
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