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ATI IXP South Bridge

While ATI’s North Bridge is extremely feature complete, providing support for all of the latest technologies, ATI’s South Bridge used on the RADEON 9100 IGP isn’t quite as adept. For starters, ASUS uses the IXP 150 on their P4R800-V Deluxe, which isn’t ATI’s latest and greatest. The IXP doesn’t provide native Serial ATA, relying on dual ATA-100 controllers instead, nor does it provide the RAID functionality found in newer chipsets. Fortunately the IXP does provide USB 2.0, up to six ports are supported, two short of Intel’s 865/875 series, but many motherboard manufacturers only provide six ports with their Intel-based motherboards anyway.

4 DIMM slots verly close to the AGP slot's retention clip

Passive heatsink on the northbridge chipset

Lower portion of the mobo

Serial ATA and FireWire

In order to provide Serial ATA functionality, SiS’ SiS180 Serial ATA controller is provided. SiS180 supports a maximum of two Serial ATA hard drives as well as RAID Levels 0, 1, 0+1, and JBOD. FireWire capability is supplied by VIA’s VT6307 FireWire controller. The VT6307 is capable of driving up to two IEE-1394 ports, but ASUS only provides one with the P4R800-V Deluxe. Both chips are popular external solutions, ASUS uses both on quite a few of its motherboards.

Audio and networking

One feature that’s becoming increasingly popular is Gigabit LAN. Intel provides this capability natively on its 875P and 865 motherboards with CSA, while NVIDIA has recently introduced it with their nForce3 250Gb. While the ATI IXP doesn’t provide Gigabit LAN functionality, ASUS has decided to integrate a Gigabit LAN controller from Marvell, the 88E8001.

The 88E8001 controller was the first to support virtual cable tester (VCT) technology, ASUS refers to this as AI Net. VCT refers to the controllers’ ability to detect network connections, allowing it to diagnose a bad network cable. The Marvell controller’s link to the system North Bridge is 266MB/sec, this is an improvement over the PCI bus used by many integrated Gigabit Ethernet controllers, which are limited to 133MB/sec of peak bandwidth.

Audio duties are handled by Analog Devices ADI1888 AC’97 CODEC. This is one of ADI’s older CODECs. Feature-wise the ADI 1888 provides six-channel audio, 20-bit DACs, jack-sensing technology (although this isn’t provided on the ASUS board), and SPDIF output. We found that it delivers, nice clean sound, but you’d definitely be better served by a discrete solution such as Creative’s Audigy line or VIA Envy24 (both of which can be found for well under $100).

The main power connector is all the way to the right

The e-VGA card pretty much taking up 2 PCI slots

The card's back plate is doubly tall too

Other features

One of our favorite features ASUS has incorporated into most of its motherboards is Q-Fan. With Q-Fan, the P4R800-V Deluxe will dynamically adjust the speed of the CPU fan based on your system’s current load and temperature. This ensures that noise is kept to a minimum, which is especially important for those of you with noisier fans or anyone planning on building a quiet PC.

Another feature ASUS has advocated recently is Wi-Fi. Like many of ASUS’ recent motherboards, the P4R800-V Deluxe supports Wi-Fi via ASUS’ proprietary Wi-Fi slot, which is located beneath the fifth PCI slot. With a separate, external ASUS 802.11b Wi-Fi card, the P4R800-V Deluxe can become the centerpiece of your wireless network.