P4 Motherboard with SD RAM Support

This microATX form factor based motherboard is aimed at the basic home or advanced corporate user. Using the Intel 845 Brookdale chipset, it supports Socket 478 P4 and Celeron processors, and uses SD-RAM instead of the more expensive but better performing RD and DDR-RAM. There is no on-board video, and thus a graphics card must be used with the AGP 4x slot. On-board audio on the other hand, is present and can give 5.1 digital sound through SPDIF. There are 2 USB, 2 serial and 1 parallel ports present on the motherboard. Being a small motherboard, it only has 3 PCI and 1 CNR slots. 

We tested the motherboard with a 2.2 GHz P4 processor, 128 MB SD-RAM, GeForce2 GTS and a Seagate Barracuda ATA II hard drive. One thing to be noted here is that this motherboard cannot be used with the latest P4 processors since they use a 533 MHz FSB, which is not supported by this chipset. Performance was good with a 43.3 in Business Winstone 2001 and 47.8 in Content Creation Winstone 2001. In gaming, we got similar results with 192 and 124 fps at 640x480x16 and 1024x768x32 resolution respectively. 

The Bottom Line: Given the performance and features, the board is slightly expensive. 

Anuj Jain at PCQ Labs