Asus P4G8X Motherboard

The Asus P4G8X Motherboard - Page 2

The Asus P4G8X Deluxe Motherboard
Intel E7205 - Granite Bay Infused Horsepower

By, Dave Altavilla
December 18, 2002

Features and Setup
Granite Bay with all the creature comforts

The rest of the layout of the P4G8X is excellent.  Specifically, the location of the DDR DIMM sockets relative to the AGP slot, gives the socket clips enough room to extend outward for easy DIMM removal without disturbing your AGP card.  This has been an area of some frustration with other boards for us as of recent.  Once again however, this board does NOT suffer from this affliction.

CLICK ANY IMAGE FOR FULL VIEW
 

   

One thing we would have liked to have seen would be a parallel RAID solution here as well as the SATA connections.  Sadly however, even the Promise SATA RAID controllers out on the market only support one channel of EIDE with SATA RAID only.  Regardless, the PC market is definitely marching toward full adoption of the SATA interface, so it is understandable why chip level solutions lean heavily towards it as well.

 

Asus P4G8X BIOS
What MSI should have done with the GNB MAX

Now this is where the Asus P4G8X steps out in a feature competition versus the MSI GNB Max.  The P4G8X BIOS is everything the MSI board should and could be, with future revisions.  There are a wealth of FSB, Voltage, AGP and Memory Timings in this BIOS and it is ripe for overclocking, as we will show you in the pages to follow.

   

     
CLICK ANY IMAGE FOR FULL VIEW

The only complaint we have here is that the P4G8X BIOS revision we've tested, doesn't support memory timing multiplication or divisors.  That is to say the the memory bus speed is locked at the FSB speed and then distributed through a standard Differential DDR clock driver, without the ability to goose it up or down in ratios etc.  This may or may not be a limitation of the Granite Bay chipset itself but we are looking into it with various contacts and will report our findings.

Test System Setup
Intel Power System

 
TEST BOARDS:
 
ASUS P4G8X (E7205 - Granite Bay)

MSI GNB Max_FISR (E7205 - Granite Bay)

Asus P4PE (i845E)

Intel DM850EMVR (i850E)

 

COMMON HARDWARE:

 

Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz CPU (533MHz FSB)
512MB Kingston HyperX PC3500 DDR DRAM
512MB Samsung PC1066 RDRAM
ATi Radeon 9700 Pro

On-board AC'97 audio
IBM ATA100 7200rpm 30GB Hard Drive
Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1
Intel Chipset Drivers v 4.10.1012

Intel Application Accelerator v2.2.2

ATi Catalyst Drivers v2.4


 

Sandra and Winstones

 

Tags:  Asus, Motherboard, 4G, P4, board, AR

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