MOTHERBOARD: ASUS P4R800 – V Deluxe Motherboard

This motherboard is based on ATI's first chipset, the Radeon 9100 IGP. It's amongst the most feature rich boards we've reviewed, with a unique feature being a special WiFi slot that can take 802.11b or g standards-based cards manufactured by Asus. The card must be purchased separately. It comes with software to convert it into a wireless access point as well, besides acting as a regular WiFi card. Depending upon the card's cost, you could add an ordinary PCI based WiFi card to get similar functionality. The board has 800 MHz FSB, dual channel DDR 400 SDRAM support with a maximum of 4 GB.

For graphics, it has an AGP 8X slot and an onboard graphics that use ATI's Radeon 9100 IGP based 3D engine, supporting up to 128 MB of shared VRAM. It also has composite video and S-Video ports, onboard SoundMax 6-channels audio CODEC, and a digital S/PDIF out connector with an optical and coaxial S/PDIF out ports. It has five PCI slots and two SATA connectors that can be configured for RAID levels 0, 1 and 0+1. Plus, there's a separate IDE RAID 0, 1, 0+1 connector, apart from the regular two IDE connectors. There are also six USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire and an Ethernet port.

We tested the P 4 R800-V board using a P 4 3.0 GHz with HT, 512 MB DDR-400 SDRAM in dual channel configuration, GeForce 4 Ti graphics card with 128 MB video RAM and a 7200 RPM HDD. While its performance isn't as great as ASUS P4P800-VM and Intel 875PBZ, that we compared it to (see table), with the external graphics card, but it does great with onboard graphics. It comes bundled with WinDVD suite to play DVDs, do video capturing and music ripping. Overall, a great buy at this price. 

Siddharth Sharma