Pentium 4 is gaining ground

With Pentium 4 prices dropping rapidly and clock speeds rising to speeds approaching 2GHz, building an affordable Pentium 4 system has never been easier. Not only has the price of the Pentium 4 1.5GHz dropped roughly 70% since its launch in November; we've also witnessed a significant reduction in RDRAM prices.

The effects of these developments are beginning to be felt by the staff here at FS. For one thing, inquiries concerning Pentium 4 are on the rise. Sure, readers are naturally inquisitive about the Pentium 4 since CPUs are such a hot topic and the fact that Pentium 4 is based on an entirely new architecture. But now we're receiving quite a few emails concerning purchasing Pentium 4 processors and selecting the right components that make up a good Pentium 4 system. With this in mind, we figured it was the right time to publish a comparison article of the hottest 850 motherboards currently on the market.

Represented here are 850 motherboards from ABIT (TH7-RAID), ASUS (P4T), Gigabyte (GA-8TX(C)), and MSI (850 Pro). Unlike previous 815 and BX motherboards which offered a wide variety of configurations and specifications, most of the 850 motherboards currently on the market are strikingly similar in both feature set and board layout. We've spent the past two weeks running these boards through our regular stable of tests and benchmarks to see if we can differentiate them a bit as everyone likes products that stand out from the crowd.

The 850 MCH

To illustrate just how similar each of these products is to each other, we've included the following chart that breaks down the feature sets of all five motherboards:

	PCI/ISA/CNR	AGP Pro	Onboard audio	Bus adjustment	Voltage adjustment	Diagnostic LED	ATX 2.03 case reqired?	St.Price
ABIT TH7-RAID	5/0/1	No	Yes (AC'97)	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	$162
ASUS P4T	5/0/0	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	$176
Gigabyte GA-8TX	5/0/1	Yes	Yes (Creative/AC'97)	Yes (limited)	No	No	No	$175
Intel D850GB	5/0/1	No	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	$153
MSI 850 Pro	5/0/1	Yes	Yes (AC'97)	No	No	Yes	No	$147

The most immediate aspect you'll notice is the lack of bus speed adjustments available in today's 850 motherboards. Only a handful offer the feature, and those that do don't even offer 1MHz bus increments. This is a far cry from 815 and BX boards out there, the CUSL2 for example offers bus speeds over 200MHz! We're hoping second generation P4 boards are more versatile as today's crop of boards is a bit underwhelming in this department.

Another aspect we noticed was price. Today's most expensive Pentium 4 motherboard, the ASUS P4T can now be found for under $180. Six months ago finding a P4T for under $200 was practically impossible.