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Quality and Setup of the VIA P4PB Ultra |
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You could say this
board has connections... |
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The VIA P4PB is both fully
featured and a good looker. Set off against a blue
PCB, the red jumpers and secondary IDE ports and yellow USB
2.0 headers really stand out. This makes it easier to
find that jumper that you need to disable, but usually can't
find quickly enough. Even though there are many
features on board, everything appears to be laid out cleanly
without too much crowding of any one area. The ATX
connections are placed to either side of the CPU, far enough
away to prevent hindering the airflow in and around the
processor. Also, the majority of the capacitors reside
either alongside the CPU bracket or between the socket and
I/O connections, allowing for easier access to the jumpers
and headers.
There are
three 184-pin DDR memory slots, which in theory can support
up to 3GB of DDR400, 1GB more than its Intel counterparts.
We did not have the opportunity to test the board with all
three banks filled, and have a strong feeling that stability
would be hard to attain in such a setup with DDR400 memory.
A standard gripe about the placement of the PCI slots was
the close proximity to the AGP card, but this is usually the
case with a board that has this many slots. Speaking
of which, there are 8 slots in total: a 1.5V AGP 8x
slot, 6 32-bit PCI slots, as well as one CNR slot. The
AGP slot uses a standard plastic retention clip to keep the
card locked in place, a feature found on most modern boards.
Other
device connections are provided by two ATA133 ports placed
along the edge near the middle of the board as well as the
floppy drive connector. The aforementioned red
secondary and RAID capable IDE ports, are placed at the far
end of the board, perpendicular to airflow from a
front-mounted case fan. These ports are controlled by
the nearby Promise 20276 ATA133 RAID controller, a common
chipset for ATA133 RAID support. As this is considered
more of a "lite" controller, it only supports RAID 0 or 1,
but not both.
Normally,
the VT8235 SouthBridge would provide support for up to six
USB 2.0 ports, but the addition of VIA's VT6202 Host
Controller added an extra four USB 2.0 ports bringing the
total to a whopping 10 ports! Included in the bundle
was a bracket that had four ports, while the other four
would be well suited to be used with cases with front
mounted USB ports. Also integrated into the
SouthBridge was the Ethernet MAC, which along with the VIA
VT6103 Physical Layer Device provided 10/100Mbps LAN
support. Rounding out the features was the on-board
audio support which came from C-Media's CMI8738 6-channel
audio controller. There are CD-in, AUX-in, Modem-in,
and S/PDIF headers on the board, as well as another bracket
that had optical and coaxial audio jacks for a complete
audio solution.
The
external connections included the standard PS/2, parallel,
and serial ports. There also were three standard audio
jacks, a game port, 2 USB 2.0 ports and the RJ-45 LAN
connection. Add in the other two brackets, and you can
see that a whole range of devices can easily be connected to
the system. Going one step further, VIA has also
included a card reader breakout box, a boon to those of us
with digital cameras. It fits into a standard 3 1/2"
bay and can read memory sticks, smart cards, and secure
digital cards. It would be nice to see companies move
away from these three types and perhaps provide readers for
some other types such as Compact Flash, which are a bit more
common in cameras. Another handy little addition, seen
in the last photo, was a power adapter which converts the
line from an older power supply unit, into the two
connections needed for P4 boards. This actually came
into use during this review when the PSU we were using
failed, and we didn't have a P4-capable unit ready to go.
We quickly dismantled an older P3 rig we had nearby, put the
power adapter on, and were back up and running in no time.
THE BIOS
AND SETUP:
The AWARD
BIOS used for VIA P4PB Ultra was a little bland, in that it
covered all of the bases without anything truly new thrown
into the mix. We found the usual options for the CAS
latencies and Command Rate as well as setting the AGP Mode
and Aperature Size. Memory timings can be switched
between 133, 166, and 200MHz and the CPU can be set anywhere
between 133 and 200MHz. For use in overclocking the
AGP volatges can be raised from 1.5V to 1.8V in 0.1
increments and the DRAM between 2.5V and 2.8V. Oddly,
the CPU voltage choices were much more limited, only
allowing us to add up to an additional 0.1V, and possibly
limiting us from overclocking further. The good news
is, this oversight can easily be corrected with a BIOS
revision, so keep an eye out for that.
We set up
the system using all of the optimal defaults but did run
into a few issues. The system would not restart after
making any changes in the BIOS. We had to disconnect
power to the board before we could get it to boot again
correctly. Although there were presets for the RAM
(Fast, Turbo, etc.), we chose to manually edit the CAS
ratings, putting in 2-2-5-2 with a Command Rate of 1T, and
did not suffer from any stability issues using DDR333
timings. Raising the memory to DDR400 speeds would
invariably cause Windows to crash, until we set the CAS
Latency back to 2.5, possibly hindering performance by doing
so. Since we were using good quality Corsair PC3200
RAM, we are fairly certain this was not the issue.
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Overclocking
the VIA P4PB Ultra |
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A
little tweak here, a little voltage there, and
Voila! |
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When we got
around to overclocking the VIA P4PB Ultra, we decided that
it would be best to use DDR333 settings for the RAM.
Even though the ratings on the Corsair XMS stick of DDR we
used should handle speeds over 400MHz, as you will see, the
overall performance was better when set to 166/333.
After having some good success overclocking Intel's i845PE
boards in the past, we were somewhat at a loss as to how
VIA's board would fare, especially with the limited options
in raising the CPU Voltages. As we raised the speeds
in the BIOS we found that we could get into Windows easily
enough until we hit 148MHz, at which point the system itself
would not get past the POST until we lowered the Command
Rate to 2T. We continued on and finally reached as
high as 157MHz for the FSB with the CPU VCore raised the
full 0.1V that the BIOS allowed us. Unfortunately, the
system was never fully stable and crashed from time to time
while running the benchmarks. We started lowering the
FSB in 1MHz increments all the way back to 150MHz before we
had a testable system. While this did raise the
effective CPU speed to 2.55GHz, an increase of about 13%, it
wasn't quite as high as we could attain with this CPU and
other i845PE boards.
System Comparisons and Sandra Scores
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