Board analysis

ASUS’ engineering team has always come up with some of the best motherboard layouts we’ve seen. Many of the snafus you’d find on other motherboards such as power connectors placed in locations that restrict airflow or DIMM sockets that are located too close to the motherboard’s AGP slot aren’t found on motherboards from ASUS. They’ve also had no qualms about taking a reference design from a motherboard manufacturer and completely redoing it, as we saw with some of their Rambus-based Pentium 4 motherboards.

For the P4S800D-E Deluxe however, ASUS plays it fairly conservative. Since this board isn’t intended for the high-end market, ASUS elected to omit the AGP Pro slot seen on the P4C800 series, as well as their popular A7N8X line. You’ll also see that the North Bridge of the system chipset is passively cooled, there is no fan paired with the North Bridge’s tall aluminum heatsink. ASUS hasn’t been using active cooling on any of its recent motherboards though, so this wasn’t too much of a surprise to us.

Plenty of space here

Passive cooling on the North Bridge

Conventional AGP slot and AGP retention mechanism

To help conserve space on the board, ASUS has placed the floppy connector and the IDE connector tied to the SiS180 chip parallel to the right edge of the board. To some, this may be a positive, as it may help clear some cable clutter, while others may see it as slight installation hassle. It all really depends on your tastes and preferences. Clearly with the extra SiS Serial ATA controller (and the two extra ports that come with it), VIA FireWire controller, and hardware monitoring and BIOS chips, space was at a premium on the P4S800D-E Deluxe.

Lots of chips here

Floppy/secondary IDE connectors

Overall there’s a lot to like about the layout of the P4S800D-E Deluxe. The ATX power connector is located perfectly, right along the edge of the motherboard, so it won’t interfere with the CPU’s cooling. The ATX12V connector isn’t quite as ideal, as it is below the CPU interface, but this is fortunately one compromise that we can live with. There’s also plenty of space between the DIMM sockets and AGP slot, a power LED is placed on the lower section of the motherboard, and ASUS color codes everything, so you can instantly recognize the game port header versus USB headers, and the pins for hooking the P4S800D-E Deluxe to your case. Even the corresponding DIMM sockets are highlighted in blue.

Compatibility

One aspect that we were really concerned about with the P4S800D-E Deluxe was stability and compatibility. If you recall the SiS648 chipset, motherboards based on it had problems with some early ATI RADEON 9700 cards. ATI claimed to have fixed the problems with later board revisions, but we never could get the combination to work with complete stability.

Therefore we threw all kinds of different devices at the P4S800D-E Deluxe, DDR400 (and up) memory modules from Geil, Corsair, Mushkin, and OCZ were all used flawlessly, as well as ATI’s line of DX9 RADEON cards. All testing went without a hitch, so we’re pretty confident that this board will work with a range of devices, just keep in mind that we haven’t tested it with a 3.4GHz Prescott processor. Intel has told us that we should receive a sample in about a month, so we’ll have to reserve judgment with that chip for a later date.