Buy Asus Computer ATX MBD 875P 400 DDR-800MHZ 5PCI RAID 8XAGP ( P4C800 DELUXE )Asus Computer ATX MBD 875P 400 DDR-800MHZ 5PCI RAID 8XAGP ( P4C800 DELUXE ) Product Description:
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Beautiful Canterwood ATX board
By Bob Carpenter
The Asus P4C800 deluxe provides the support for the new Intel 875 "Canterwood" chipset (Intel 875P MCH north bridge and Intel ICH5 south bridge). ASUS provides support for the new 800MHz front-side bus, 2*200MHz DDR memory (PC3200), hyperthreading and serial ATA drives. So far, the only chip available that exploits all of this power is the 3.0MHz Intel P4 "Northwood". I have two of these boards and built two machines, one with the 3.0MHz P4 with 800MHz FSB and one with a 2.4MHz P4 with 533MHz FSB, and both installed and booted with no problem.
The deluxe version of the ASUS board foregoes the Intel chipset's support for RAID, replacing it with a Promise 20378 RAID controller, which is a bit beefier and frees the chipset up for other work. The Promise controller supports RAID 0 or RAID 1 for two serial ATA drives and/or two UltraATA drives (or both, but who knows what'll happen if you mix drive speeds to create a RAID 0/1 configuration). I went with RAID 0 and two Seagate Barracuda drives for optimal speed. There's room for 2 more serial ATA disks, as well as four more UltraATA disks. Installation of the RAID was the only tricky part, as Windows XP required the drivers to be burned onto a floppy and inserted in the midst of the OS installation.
The board also provides the 3COM 3C940 Gigabit LAN controller, which worked perfectly as soon as the driver was installed, though I'm only using it in 100Mbit mode. The board also includes the Analog Devices AD1985 AC '97 CODEC, with S/PDIF (coaxial digital) output. This is great, as you get full surround sound out of DVDs played on the computer and you can decode it with a home-theater receiver (I'm using the Harman Kardon 325, and the sound is great). Rounding out the extra chips on the board is the VIA 1394 IEEE1394 controller (aka firewire). In total, the back panel has 1 parallel, 1 serial, 1 PS/2 keyboard, 1 PS/2 mouse, 1 S/PDIF (digital audio), 1 analog audio I/O, 1 IEEE1394 (firewire), and 1 RJ45 (LAN). There's additiaonl support for an additional 4 USB 2.0 and 1 IEEE1394 front-case ports. It also includes 2 UltraDMA, 2 serial ATA, 1 IDE, and 1 floppy cable.
The AMI BIOS and installation were quite easy to navigate. In fact, I'd never built a computer before, and between the case's manual and the motherboard's manual, I was able to build everything with almost no other reference material (though I can highly recommend the 14th edition of Scott Mueller's "Upgrading and Repairing PCs" if you want deeper knowledge of machine internals).
I used 4 sticks of Corsair 512MB PC3200 memory (CMX512-3200C2), and it works great. The memory must be installed in pairs of the same type for the DDR DIMM slots on this machine. In my second machine, I used two sticks of Kingmax PC3200 MPXB62D, which also worked just fine.
One other concern I had is the northbridge heatsink. In early photos, it was shown mounted on a diagonal. On my model, it is mounted square to the rest of the board. This is good, because I'm using a giant Zalman heatsink on my Radeon graphics card, and if it were on a diagonal, they might hit one another.
Including WinDVD 4.0 is a very nice touch. The quality of DVD playback through my computer and Radeon 9700 card is fabulous, and the digital-analog decoding for sound is done through the audio-visual receiver.
The P4C800 (non-deluxe) is a stripped down version of this board, though I have not seen it for sale anywhere.
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