Intel’s Latest P4 Motherboard

The latest motherboard from Intel based on the 845 chipset has some neat value-added features including a rich software bundle, and new BIOS enhancements for speedier booting and updates. The board has a socket 478 for the smaller P4 processors and supports conventional SDRAM. It has three DIMM slots with a combined capacity of 1.5 GB, which is enough for any use. Plus, it has a 4x AGP slot, six PCI and a CNR for adding more cards. It also has four USB ports. The board is well laid out and all the ports are onboard and color-coded, which makes installation a breeze. One drawback is that it takes only 133 MHz SDRAM. So you won’t be able use your older RAM on this board. 

To check out its performance we used a P4 2 GHz with 256 MB SDRAM, a 20 GB Seagate Barracuda ATA III hard drive and an ASUS V8200 Ti500 Deluxe, which is based on the Geforce3 Ti 500 chip from Nvidia. As far as performance goes, there are no issues with the board whether in running high-end graphics apps, gaming, or productivity applications. It performed very well in all our benchmarks. We compared it to the DFI board, which supports DDR memory, and found it not much behind. In the gaming and 3Dgraphics tests, it was only 7% behind the DFI. The next two tests we ran were BW (Business Winstone) 2001 and CCW (Content Creation Winstone) 2001 for productivity and high-end apps respectively. It matched the DFI in BW, and remained only 7% behind in

CCW. 

Its impressive software bundle includes Norton Internet Security 2000, Encryption Plus Secure Export, Intel Active Monitor, and NTI CD Maker 2000 software for creating CDs. It also has the Intel Express BIOS update, which simplifies updating the motherboard’s BIOS. A utility, downloadable from Intel’s site can update the BIOS through Windows itself. So, no more tampering with messy jumper settings. Also interesting is the Intel Rapid BIOS Boot, which reduces system boot-up time. With this, when you turn on your system, you will see a blank screen for sometime, after which it will simply start your Windows desktop. While this can be useful for end users, the blank screen can also mislead them to think that the system is not functioning. Plus, if you do have to go inside the BIOS configuration, you have to change the jumper setting. 

The bottom line: Considering the rich software bundle, great performance, and a three-year warranty, the board is a great buy. 

Sachin Makhija at PCQ Labs