Asus P4PE BP

Asus faces an uphill struggle with its limited edition (20,000 units worldwide) P4PE Black Pearl motherboard, as it has a high price tag of £150 ex VAT, but it is a rather lovely Pentium 4 motherboard that is based on the 845PE chipset.

Most of the spec is quite run of the mill, but there are some design touches that elevate it above the norm.

The Socket 478, three DDR slots and AGP 4x support are standard on a decent board, as are the integrated 5.1-channel audio and 10/100 local area network.

The two back brackets that add a gameport, two extra USB2 ports and optical and coaxial S/PDIF are desirable but hardly unique. Asus Instant Music is a Bios-based app that plays audio CDs through the integrated audio while the PC is shut down.

On the downside there is no Raid or Serial ATA (SATA) controller on this board.

We liked the layout, with the main ATX power connector right up the top at the side, next to which is the Asus EZ Plug connector which you can use instead of the ATX 12v connector, if you have an older power supply.

The AGP slot has a sliding retention device to lock your graphics card in place and a protection mechanism ensures the board refuses to boot if you try to use an incompatible 3.3v card.

We tested with a 2.8GHz P4 and 256MB PC2700 and performance wascomparable to the Granite Bay boards we reviewed in February, which is impressively fast.

Contact:
Scan 01204 474 747
www.scan.co.uk target

Specifications:

• P4 Northwood Socket 478 400/ 533MHz FSB
• Intel 845PE chipset with ICH4
• 3 memory slots
• up to 2GB PC2700
• AGP 4x
• 6 PCI slots
• 1 floppy, 2 parallel ATA100 controllers
• 6 USB2 ports
• 2 PS/2, 2 serial, 1 parallel, 1 game port, optical & coaxial S/PDIF
• 10/100 Broadcom BCM4401 Lan
• 6-channel audio