Board Features

Considering the similarities between the 865PE and 875P chipsets, you’d naturally assume ASUS would do one of two things for the P4P800 Deluxe: build a direct copy of the 875P-based P4C800 Deluxe, or implement a similar design but at a substantially reduced cost. Surprisingly, ASUS has chosen to do neither.

RAID controllers

For starters, ASUS has implemented Intel’s ICH5R South Bridge for P4P800 Deluxe, rather than the ICH5 used on the P4C800 series. The ICH5R adds native IDE RAID support to the chipset, specifically RAID Level 0 (striping) and supports two hard drives. Promise’s PDC20378 controller was used on the P4C800 Deluxe and while it adds RAID 1 support in addition to RAID 0, it’s also tied to the 133MB/sec PCI bus, creating a bottleneck since the P4C800 Deluxe also uses the PCI bus for FireWire and Gigabit Ethernet.

ICH5R and Serial ATA ports

VIA RAID controller

In addition to the ICH5R, the P4P800 Deluxe also offers RAID support for parallel IDE hard drives. This is provided by the VIA VT6410. The VT6410 supports RAID Levels 0, 1, 0+1, and JBOD (spanning).

JBOD, short for “just a bunch of disks” really isn’t RAID as you traditionally know it at all. JBOD simply combines multiple hard drives into a single volume. Unfortunately, you don’t get the performance benefits of striping (RAID 0), or the data security of mirroring (RAID 1). JBOD will allow you to combine hard disks of different sizes without losing any capacity (i.e. a 40GB drive and a 20GB drive can be combined into one 60GB volume), but this is its only real advantage over the other RAID options.

ASUS continues to use 3Com’s 940 controller rather than CSA, but considering the market the ASUS P4P800 Deluxe is aiming for (desktop rather than workstation for the P4C800) we can understand this move: there simply aren’t many home users that use Gigabit switches. In addition, the use of the aforementioned ICH5R chip rather than ICH5 reduces the workload on the PCI bus.

3Com networking

SoundMAX audio onboard

FireWire and audio

In addition to the VIA RAID controller, VIA’s VT6307 FireWire controller is integrated on the P4P800 Deluxe as well. VIA’s VIA Fire controllers are pretty common on Intel-based motherboards, as manufacturers chose to implement the technology even though the chipset doesn’t natively support it. Texas Instruments is another popular supplier.

Audio duties are handled by Analog Devices AD1985 SoundMAX controller. We’ve praised SoundMAX audio many times in the past, so we won’t do so again here, but needless to say that it’s the best integrated audio offering currently available on the market short of NVIDIA’s audio processing unit present in many nForce and nForce2 motherboards. The new jack-sensing technology makes installation issues a thing of the past, informing the end user if a device is hooked up incorrectly.

ASUS “Deluxe”?

One area we’ve noticed ASUS has begun to grow complacent is the accessories included in the packaging. Both the P4P800 Deluxe and P4C800 Deluxe ship without external USB brackets! This means end user’s are limited to the four ports provided on the back plate of the motherboard out of the box. Keep in mind that both chipsets natively support eight USB devices.

With many motherboard manufacturers going out of their way to include tons of accessories (including round IDE cables) in their retail packaging, the ASUS P4P800 Deluxe doesn’t seem very “deluxe” in this department.

P4P800 Deluxe back panel

Profile shot of the board