ASUS P4P800-X - motherboard - ATX - i865PE

Advantages: Supports.... Everything!
Disadvantages: As with all boards, difficult to set up!

...Welcome to the fourth installment of my computer component reviews! My motherboard is the 865PE Neo2 - P. I'm assuming that this is the same, it certainly looks the same. MSI is a highly respected motherboard manufactorer and have incorporated the intel 865PE chipset into this fantastic motherboard. Thanks to Rabid's suggestion, I went to the MSI section of overclockers. There I found the one he suggested, below it was this baby. For just £10 more I could have dual DDR RAM, as well as a few other minor enhancements. This board has all the standard features, like AGP 8x, ATA 133 support and 5 PCI ports. It's also got 4 ram slots (with dual DDR ram support and supporting up to 500Mhz RAM on overclock speeds). It supports all pentium 4 chips including the new Extreme and Prescott processors. For those who don't understand that... Read review

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Advantages: Cooling excellent, digital display for errors modern architecture
Disadvantages: Set up is a pig. Out of date bios problems, format hard drive to install, no on board graphics

...When it comes to setting up PCs nowadays, im becoming a bit of an expert. They say practice makes perfect! The amount of PC's we tend to go though at work is criminal! So when it came time to upgrade one of my developers machines, we decided to get away from the Athlon environment we have become used to and hop on the Pentium 4 bandwagon. For this, we needed a good Motherboard with a good chipset and the power to drive some of the most demanding software in the software development industry. So it was with this in mind that i purchased an ABIT A17 motherboard. While it does not take the latest and greatest 775 pin P4 chips, it does take the older and still as good 1MB cache ,478 pin chips. It come with some real whizzy gadgets for keeping the technology cool.The Chipset is kept cool with a circular Heatsink. Looks amazing... Read review

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Advantages: Many Ram slots, 800mhz FSB supported
Disadvantages: Fan on northbridge makes a lot of noise

...sounding like a lawnmower after about 3 months of usage (before then it was unnoticable) it cost me £5 for a whopping heatsink to keep it cool with no fan. Connectors Here is a list of all sockets on this motherboard 1x Socket 478 processor 4x 184 pin DDR slots 4x PCI slots 1x AGP 8x 2x IDE 2x SATA 3x 3 pin fan connectors 1x Floppy IDE connector 2x USB headers 2x Firewire headers 1x audio header 1x HDD activity light connector 2x PS/2 connectors 1x optical in 1x optical out 3x audio out 1x line out 1x mic in 1x LAN 1x Parallel 1x serial 4x USB (not including ones on backplate) 1x Firewire (again not inclding backplate) Conclusion This has been a great motherboard with many good features i would reccomend it to anyone considering building a pc with a pentium 4 socket 478. With the only problem being a noisy NB... Read review

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