ASRock P4VM8 Motherboard

This motherboard from ASRock is compact with a MicroATX form factor. It is based on VIA PT800 chipset. The board is compatible with Celeron and P4 processors and has three PCI slots, eight USB ports, one AGP 4X/8X slot, two SATA ports, two IDE connectors and one RJ-45 port.

The maximum RAM support is 2 GB. The board has 6-channel surround sound. However, the board lacks dual channel DDR support. Only two slots for RAM are provided on the board. Other features include CPU overheat shutdown and CPU frequency step-less control.

The board was tested using P4, 3.2 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM and a 7200 RPM HDD. When tested with an 8x graphics card from Gainward, the scores for business applications, content creation applications, 3Dmark 2001 and Quake 3 Arena were 22.7 Winstone Units, 26.8 Winstone Units, 1031 3D marks and 85.3 fps, respectively. The results for onboard performance in 3DMark and Quake 3 Arena were 49 3DMarks and 25.8 fps, respectively. This board scored much lower than the PowerColor board in all the benchmarks.

Bottom Line: It's an expensive board if you compare its performance to that from PowerColor reviewed in this issue.

Rupin Vij