The Motherboards

The motherboards and their features

Tech-talk these days can only go so far without a shootout. Below is a comparative matrix of the boards we gathered for the roundup.

Boards and Specifications
	PCI/CM R	ATX12V Required	Onboard audio	Bus Tweak	Voltage Tweak	RAID	LAN
ASUS P4B	6/1	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
DFI NB72-SR	5/1	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No
FIC VC11	5/1	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes
Shuttle AB30-R	5/0	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Tyan Trinity i845	6/0	No	Yes	No	No	No	No

One of the most interesting features that board manufacturers are implementing on their new products is the ability to operate without an ATX12V power supply. Standard specifications by Intel, calls for all Pentium 4 motherboards to have ATX12V headers on approved power supplies. This ensures that there is enough power for the Pentium 4 to operate stably. However, as most Pentium 4 users now know, upgrading to the P4 meant that they could no longer use their standard ATX power supplies.

ASUS and Tyan have implemented methods to enable you to go on using any current power supply you may have. On the ASUS P4B, a standard 4-pin drive connector acts as the auxiliary 12V line if you plan to use a vanilla power supply. For those with souped up ATX12V power supplies, you'll be using the square 4-pin 12V connector.

If that's simplicity, Tyan goes a step further and allows you to run with a standard power supply without connecting anything extra! Just plug it in, and fire it up. No hassles, no drive connectors used up - just easy upgrading.

On-board Extras

Other notable mentions include DFI and FIC adding onboard 100Mbit Ethernet to their boards. DFI also includes onboard IDE RAID care of a Promise controller. These days, with more and more hard drives dropping in price and increasing in capacity, people are snapping up extra drives without hesitation. If your motherboard only comes with its standard 2 channel IDE controller, you'll be squeezed into using a maximum of 4 drives. We'd like to see the trend move towards having more than 2 IDE channels for the sake of being able to add more drives, if not for RAID.

Onboard LAN is becoming more and more popular these days and with the ever expanding broadband user base, more and more motherboards manufacturers ought to consider adding LAN as an available option or as a standard feature. According to inside sources, a 3COM 920C or Intel EtherExpress controller would only add, at most, up to $20 to the manufacturing cost of the board.

So far, DFI seems to be offering the richest feature set, but we'll have to check out its performance and how it stacks up with the rest of the boards. Because the i845 is already such a mature chipset, we suspect that all the boards here would perform within small margins of each other.

Performance Woes

In general, expect i845 boards to subtract roughly 300MHz from the specified speed of your P4 running on a top-end i850 chipset. In other words, a P4 2.0GHz on i845 runs like a P4 1.7GHz on i850. We'll make it clear right here. We don't feel the lower price of i845 justifies the performance drop, so you won't see any of these boards score higher than a C+ in Performance. This shouldn't reflect poorly on the respective motherboard manufacturers, who have nothing to do with the capped performance of their boards, and who are marketing i845 to decidedly non-enthusiast customers.