High-end Motherboard for Workstations

This is another new motherboard from the Asus stable. It’s based on the
Intel 850E chipset, which supports the latest Socket 478 P4s (both 400 MHz and
533 MHz FSB) and Celeron CPUs. Plus, it supports the latest PC1066 RDRAM, making
it a great option for those who want extreme performance from their 3D games and
graphics intensive applications. Of course, you must pair it up with a 533 MHz
FSB CPU to get the best results. 

On the expandability front, the board has 5 PCI and 1 CNR riser slots. An AGP
4x port is available to accommodate the graphics adapter. Plus it also has
onboard Ethernet for networks or broadband connectivity. On-board sound has also
come a long way, with the board having an AC-97 codec that can deliver 6-channel
digital sound through S/PDIF. There are 4 USB 2.0 ports on the motherboard with
two expansion headers for 8 more. Another new feature is the motherboard ability
to report its POST status through the computer speaker. But this seemed of
little practical value as the voice was indiscernible.

We tested the motherboard using a 2.53 GHz P4 processor, 256 MB RDRAM,
GeForce2 GTS and a Seagate Barracuda ATA II hard drive on Windows XP. The
motherboard scored 56.1 and 79.7 in Business Winstone and Content Creation
Winstone 2001 respectively, both of which are good scores. In Quake III Arena,
we got frame rates of 299.1 and 133.8 at 640x480x16 and 1024x768x32 resolution.
Overall, this motherboard is a very good performer.

The Bottom Line: This board is not as feature-rich as its P4B-533
counterpart (also reviewed in this issue), but has more features than most other
boards.

Anuj Jain at PCQ Labs