ASUS P4S8X SiS 648 Motherboard Review

Name: ASUS P4S8X SiS 648 Motherboard Review - Page 3
Brand: ASUS

by HH Editor — Saturday, December 14, 2002, 11:00 PM EDT

ASUS P4S8X SiS 648 Motherboard Review - Page 3

Page 3: ASUS P4S8X SiS 648 Motherboard Review - Page 3

ASUS P4S8X SiS 648 Motherboard
AGP 8X, Serial ATA and More!

By: Chris Angelini
December 16, 2002

Quake III v.1.17 Demo001

Classic OpenGL

Both the SR7-8X and and D845PEBT2 outperform the ASUS board by about five percent in Quake III. Of course, the result is amplified since we're looking at a low-resolution test. As the resolution increases, you'll see that discrepancy disappear for the most part as the game is limited by the graphics card instead of the platform.

3D Mark 2001 SE

Synthetic DirectX 8 Gaming

Here we see more of what the other gaming benchmarks have illustrated. That is, the three competing boards perform evenly throughout 3D Mark 2001. Of course, this speaks volumes for SiS as it is clearly able to match Intel's own performance chipset using comparable memory and processor technologies.

Content Creation Winstone 2002 and Business Winstone 2001

Simulated Application Performance

ASUS' P4S8X manages to outperform the competing ABIT SR7-8X in both Business Winstone and Content Creation. It even manages to edge out Intel's D845PEBT2 in Content Creation 2002, though the i845PE platform takes first place in Business Winstone.

CONCLUSION:

We certainly have mixed feelings about this ASUS P4S8X motherboard. On one hand, it offers a host of useful features like Serial ATA, IEEE 1394, integrated Ethernet and 6-channel audio. It also delivers a handful of BIOS options that enable effective overclocking. Moreover, even at its default speed, the P4S8X is able to perform on par with Intel's i845PE chipset.

At the same time, we can't help but notice that ASUS' P4PE i845PE motherboard is priced to compete with the P4S8X. In addition, it doesn't suffer the same glaring RADEON 9700 incompatibilities as the SiS 648 boards we've looked at thus far. We've heard that a revised RADEON 9700 Pro fixes the stability issues, but between all of the RADEON 9700 Pro, All in Wonder RADEON 9700 Pro and RADEON 9500 products we've looked at, not one has worked properly with this board. We feel that, If you're building a high-end gaming PC, you'll want to consider a Pentium 4 board based on either the i845PE or even perhaps the Intel E7205 Granite Bay chipset.

If you've already purchased a GeForce4 card or an older RADEON, you may find the P4S8X more suitable. Keep in mind that the SiS 648 chipset doesn't support HyperThreading, though the upcoming SiS 655 will be compatible with Intel's latest innovation. In light of the board's shortcomings and a market full of attractive alternatives, we're going to give the P4S8X a 6.5 on the HotHatdware meter.