Intel Springdale Showdown

The Springdale Showdown
Which board should you "spring" for?

Brought to you by Robert Maloney
July 10, 2003

The Asus P4P800 Deluxe Motherboard:

Asus foregoes all of the color schemes and flashiness of the other boards, and focuses on building a stable platform instead.  In what could be considered a throwback, the Asus P4P800 motherboard is based on a tan PCB, with mostly standard colors for connectors.  As with most boards, we had the usual gripe about the AGP slot placement.  It is placed too close to the DIMM slots, which makes it harder to remove installed DIMMs when an AGP card is installed.  There was plenty of room between the AGP slot and the first PCI slot that could have been used to create a larger gap.  Otherwise, we had no real argument with the placement of the rest of the components.  The main IDE and floppy connectors are clustered towards the front of the board along with the 20-pin ATX plug.  The other ATX connector is on the far side of the CPU, not hindered by any power circuitry, and the power cable can be tied neatly around the edge of the board. 

In the corner of the board were two other IDE ports, controlled by the VIA VT6410 RAID controller, offering the user both IDE and SATA RAID possibilities.  Interestingly, one port is placed in a standard position, perpendicular to the end of the board.  The other port, however, is angled like those on the Abit IS7-G.  We aren't sure why the two styles are used, and feel it would have been better to have both of the IDE ports angled along the edge.  The P4P800 was the only board to use passive cooling for the North Bridge, where a large, finned aluminum heatsink was placed.  We will see if this has any overall effect during testing, especially while overclocking the board.  On-board audio was provided by the ADI AD1985 CODEC chip, found at the top of the board along with the VIA VT3407 IEEE1394a (FireWire) Controller and 3COM Gigabit Ethernet controller.  Rather than the clip that is often used with AGP cards to keep them in place, the P4P800 has a sliding lock mechanism, which we find to be a better solution.  The area around the AGP slot was actually quite clear of circuitry, unlike some of the other boards we tested.  What we did find nearby was one of the two LEDs used to alert the user when the board is plugged in, or in standby mode.  Little touches that come in handy for those of us who are constantly building and tearing down systems.

THE BUNDLE:

The board is called the P4P800 Deluxe, yet after looking at the board, and the relatively simple bundle, we had to ask where the "Deluxe" in the title came from.  As we described earlier, the board had a number of great features, but not the "look" of a premium board.  The bundle followed suit.  There was a user's manual and quick setup guide, and a drivers CD.  We also found a WinDVD Suite CD to round out the software.  To accompany the music capabilities on the board, there was a music oriented template that can be placed over the keyboard.  Other than that, the other contents of the box were four black IDE ribbon cables, two red SATA cables, and three jumper caps.  No other brackets for additional ports, of which there were plenty of connectors on the board begging to be used.  We can only hope that a "Black Pearl" version of the P4P800 is in the works, with a little more flash and a few more goodies.

Specifications & Features of The Asus P4P800 Deluxe Tapping into the power of the HyperPath

The BIOS:

The Asus P4P800 Deluxe came with an AMI (American Megatrends, Inc.) BIOS.  All of the fun stuff can be found under the "Advanced" heading.  In the "Chipset" section, users can fine-tune the memory timings as they see fit, and change the AGP aperture.  Memory Acceleration Mode (MAM) is enabled here as well, which is what drives the "HyperPath" technology, bringing PAT-like performance to the P4P800.  Asus was the first of the manufacturers to incorporate this kind of tweak in their BIOS, and it appears that all of the major players will be quick to follow.

Delving deeper into the Advanced settings, we found what Asus calls the AI Overclock Tuner.  Simply put, this setting can automatically overclock the system by 5%, 10%, 20%, or 30%.  For users who are a bit unsure of what to change when overclocking, this option can take some of the guesswork out of setting up their system.  For our purposes, we left this at "manual".  Instead of ratios, the relative speed of the RAM is shown, correctly using 400, 320, and 266MHz settings.  Some systems mistakenly will show this as "400, 333, 266", but the correct math shows a 5:4 ratio to equal 400/320Mhz.  The CPU voltage options are staggering, going as high as 1.95V in .025V steps.  Hard-core overclockers will appreciate this range, but those who try to go too high risk putting their CPU in danger of being damaged. 

Overclocking: Asus P4P800 Deluxe Performance and Stability - a great combination

STOCK CPU SPEED 2.40GHz P4

CPU OVERCLOCKED TO 3.48GHz (12 X 290MHz)

We set out overclocking the P4P800 Deluxe, knowing full well that we had plenty of voltage options, the lack of which had stopped us cold on the Albatron 865PE Pro II.  We won't go into the specific details of each and every attempt to overclock the system, but for the most part it was a smooth process, with relatively few crashes or lockups.  Eventually, we got as high as 290MHz for the FSB, the same peak that we reached with the Abit IS7-G.  However, we did not have to disable MAM to get this high, nor did the overall performance tail off as we saw with the Abit board.  While we did not have any problems with standard operations within Windows XP, we could not complete all but one of the benchmarks, even with the CPU Voltage up to 1.75V (we didn't dare going any higher while using a stock Intel cooler.)  We lowered the FSB by 1Mhz at a time, and found the system to be completely testable at 285Mhz, the highest stable overclock of the bunch.

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