Some manufacturers build motherboards made for overclocking. Others build with stability in mind. Some concentrate on eye-candy; whereas others ditch aesthetics in favour of build quality. While one can debate who builds a faster board, it's generally agreed upon that ASUS manages to find a good balance of what is important to the enthusiast.

The ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe is one such example. On paper, it has the makings of a dream motherboard. 800FSB Pentium 4s are supported, as well as all the good stuff we've come to expect from Canterwood based motherboards. It doesn't end there though, as ASUS also throws in an Intel CSA-based Gigabit LAN controller, a Promise SATA RAID controller, and some unique overclocking options. Add to this their rep for making quality boards, and things are looking good for the P4C800-E Deluxe.

The ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe

One thing that is apparent is that ASUS stuck to function over form. You won't find any fancy coloured PCB, nor will you find neon lights. At first glance, their layout seems to be standard fare, with no glaring problems off the bat. This becomes more impressive when you consider how much they packed on the PCB.

Naturally, 800FSB CPUs, AGP8x, Dual Channel DDR and (Intel's Communication Streaming Architecture) CSA are all supported thanks to the 875P MCH. There isn't any active cooling for the MCH though, as ASUS chose to stick with a regular heatsink. Based on our overclocking results, it seems to do an adequate job, though you may want to swap it with an active cooler if you'd like.

The ICH5R Southbridge takes care of business by supporting USB 2.0, SATA (RAID supported), six-channel audio, as well as legacy ATA100 and 10/100 Ethernet.

Although the board natively supports Intel RAID Technology, ASUS included a Promise PDC20378 SATA150 controller for additional IDE and RAID support. There is also an Intel Gigabit Ethernet controller, which I prefer over other Gigabit solutions I've tested. For sound, the robust Realtek ALC650 makes another appearance here. The VIA VT6307 enables full support for the 1394 features.

There are five PCI slots, which should be enough for most of you. There aren't any onboard peripherals I'd replace, other than the sound perhaps, so you have quite a bit of room for expansion.

The BIOS

The AMI BIOS is the heart and soul of the ASUS P4C800-E. This BIOS is a popular choice of many OEM system builders, but the version implemented by ASUS allows quite a bit of tweaking, which is something I cannot say for a builder such as Dell.

You'll be able to tweak many of your CPU options in the Advanced CPU settings, though don't get too excited with the multiplier setting as chances are you won't be able to do anything with it unless your CPU is an engineering sample. The board allows some basic overclocking, such as a 5% to 30% OC, but by setting the AI Overclock Tuner to manual, you can edit the FSB itself.

Naturally, as you begin to overclock components, you'll need to be able to increase the voltages to maintain stability. You can go as high as 1.95v for the CPU, 2.85v for ram, and 1.80v for AGP. I would have liked to have seen some higher memory voltages as many of todays PC4000 modules can handle up to 2.9v, which may be necessary at 250FSB+.

The memory timing option are decent, allowing you to change almost everything you need. There's also an acceleration mode to squeeze more performance out of your setup. Make sure you have ram that can handle it though.

The Instant Music option is a setting for music listening. Here's a bit from their site:

"If you are using your system for music enjoyment and still going through the long process of Windows' Media Player, then you are way behind. Music is a good way to balance out your hectic day, but why waste time on waiting for Windows. ASUS' Instant Music feature allows you to listen to your favorite songs with only a few push on the keyboard."

Basically, it gives you the ability of listening to music CDs without loading up the OS. How useful this is will depend on you, but as you can see in the above pic, I didn't really care for it.

Overclocking

We got a little hint of what this board is able to do at 1:1 CPU and memory in our recent PC4000 memory reviews. 285FSB was as high as we've gotten, but the system wasn't stable at all. At 280FSB, the system ran fairly well, completing benchmarks without problems.

I was pretty certain we could push the motherboard and CPU combo higher though, so we lowered the divider, removing the memory from the equation, and proceeded to push the P4C800-E.

We were able to get as high as 290FSB using our Swiftech H20-8500, and bumping the vCore up to 1.90v. 1.95v didn't help matters, so it looked like this is as far as the board will go. The system was shakey though, and a drop down to 286FSB was much more stable.

Test Setup

ABIT IC7-MAX3: Pentium 4 2.4C, 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC4000 Ram, ATI AIW Radeon 9800 Pro, 120GB SATA Seagate, Windows XP SP1, ATi Catalyst 3.6.

ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe: Pentium 4 2.4C, 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC4000 Ram, ATI AIW Radeon 9800 Pro, 120GB SATA Seagate, Windows XP SP1, ATi Catalyst 3.6.

Memory timings for the motherboards will be 2-3-3-6 at 200FSB and 2.5-4-3-6 for 250FSB.

SiSoftware Sandra 2004

Although a synthetic benchmark, it's a popular one, freely available if you wish to make comparison benchmarks. We will be testing the CPU, MMX, and memory speeds.

CPU Arithmetic Benchmark

CPU Multimedia Benchmark

Just mere percentage points separate the P4C800 from the IC7, with the IC7-MAX3 getting the nod at all clock speeds. You'll be hard pressed to notice this though in day-to-day operations.

Memory Benchmark

What is surprising here is that the ASUS board fared pretty well against the Game Accelerator enabled IC7. I half expected the IC7 to blow ASUS away here, but this was far from being the case.

PC Mark 2002

At the overclocked 250FSB settings, the Game Accelerator makes a far larger impact this time around. as the IC7-MAX3's lead is much more evident, but these are only synthetic benchmarks. Let's move on to real-world benchmarks.

PiFast

A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is version 4.2, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

Lower is Better

Not much difference here again, but at 3GHz, the IC7 leads by almost two seconds in its calculation time.

TMPGEnc MPEG Encoding

Video editing is a taxing chore, and we'll be testing the IC7-MAX3 using TMPGEnc 2.512 to encode a 7.78MB, 1:30 movie trailer to a 24FPS MPG file. Note that lower scores are better.

Lower is Better

Dead even between the boards, though this is likely more the result of us using a small MPG file. We'll be looking into updating this test in the near future.

Unreal Tournament 2003 @ 640

UT2K3 s a real system killer, and can bring many systems to its knees. We used the , which are excellent tools in testing various resolutions and detail levels. We selected the CPU test, which uses the dm-inferno map.

The IC7 boards simply blow the P4C800-E away here. It appears that the Game Accelerator optimizations seem to be the deciding factor here.

Splinter Cell @ 640

New to our test bench is UbiSoft's 3rd person action game, Splinter Cell. We used the Beyond3D demo, and ran the demo at 640x480 at the lowest detail levels.

A bit closer in Splinter Cell than it was with UT2003, but the ASUS board trails nonetheless by a couple frames per second. Unlike in UT2003, the Game Accelerator on the IC7 is less of a factor.

Subsystem Testing

The first thing we'll check is the audio. We downloaded and installed to test its CPU utilization.

Unlike the past Realtek solutions, CPU utilization was quite a bit lower thoughout the DirectSound3D tests. CPU utilization never got to 10%, but it did average in the 3% - 9% range. Keep in mind though that this still doesn't compare to the nForce 2 (which is an AMD only platform) and its <2% averages. This is a synthetic benchmark though, and since I know all of you enjoy a game or two, let's see how the sound will affect UT 2003 performance.

The [H]ardocp Tool has an option to enable and disable sound during testing. Tests will be done with the same hardware configuration as the rest of the benchmarks, except we'll only be displaying the ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe's numbers @ 2.4GHz.

UT 2003, Minimum Detail, 640x480 Resolution

With sound enabled, the P4C800-E Deluxe takes a nasty 16 frames per second hit. This is an improvement compared to times whenever we test the onboard Realtek solution. I doubt most of you play at these settings, so let's look at something more realistic.

UT 2003, Maximum Detail, 1280x1024 Resolution

When it comes down to it, at high resolution and detail levels, the onboard sound's CPU utilization will not be a factor at all. I for one won't be able to spot a 0.0002 difference, so if you're going to game with the onboard sound, you should be fine.

In terms of sound quality, I found gaming to be very acceptable, as was the case with movie and MP3 playback. I didn't hear any distortion, even when moving files around the hard disk.

Hard Drive Performance

The maximum read speed with the Seagate SATA drive was about 56MB/sec, with 45MB/sec being the average. CPU usage was low at 2.7%, which is in line with other Intel based SATA interfaces I've tested. The numbers are a slight improvement over the IC7, but not by much.

Network Performance

We used to test the networking speed, and Windows Task Manager for CPU usage. We copied a variety of install files, totalling 752 MB, varying in sizes of 300kb to as much as 450MB per file from the P4C800-E Deluxe machine, to our IC7-MAX3 box, which uses the same NIC. Both systems were connected via a Cat-5E crossover cable, which should prevent any bottlenecks that would arise with our standard 10/100 router.

Download speeds averaged about 29.28MB/sec, and CPU utilization averaged about 28%, with 24% being the low mark.

Uploading the same files averaged about 49.21MB/sec, and CPU utilization averaged about 32%, with 26% being the low mark.

These numbers are in a best case scenario, using Gigabit networking. A quick test of an FTP upload and download of 30 MB resulted with an average of 72kb/sec up and 411kB/sec. This was through a 10/100 router and 10/100 cable modem.

I should point out that the Ethernet implementation by ASUS was a bit speedier that the IC7-MAX3 previously reviewed, but CPU utilization was a little higher.

Final Words

ASUS did a lot of things right with the P4C800-E Deluxe. The board was very fast, and extremely stable. They don't include a whole lot of frills and extras, but the end result is a cheaper priced board. A nice upgrade from their P4C800 is adding the ICH5R and allowing more vCore voltage (the vCore bump was added in BIOS v1006).

The BIOS is well suited for tweakers, though the AMIBIOS isn't something many people are going to be familiar with. All your options are there, but it'll take some digging to find all of them. I do think a higher DDR voltage of 2.9v and up would have been a good idea, as some ram modules could use a bit more than the 2,85v the ASUS board tops out at.

Performance-wise, the P4C800-E is a rocket. Though the performance trailed slightly behind the IC7-MAX3, most of us won't notice that in day-to-day work/gaming. Stability was rock solid. The board never crashed throughout testing, and to this day, I still use it extensively when torture testing ram. Speaking of which, out of the box, we had no problems with any of our PC4000 ram modules. This was not the case with all our previous ABIT boards that required BIOS updates to overclock past 250FSB. That isn't to say that an ABIT board you buy today will have problems, but this particular ASUS board worked problem free for us right from the start.

Overclocking was very strong, and only got a bit shakey once we passed 270FSB, 1:1, with certain ram modules. A couple of Corsair ProSeries ran super, though we still never cracked past 285FSB, 1:1. Running with more conservative settings, we bumped up to 295FSB, but that was it. Still, a good show by ASUS.

At , the board is still fairly pricey in my opinion, but it falls in line with the cost of most Canterwood based boards. Those of you who do pony up the dough will be quite happy with it.

Pros: Excellent performance and stability.

Cons: DDR voltage could use a higher ceiling, expensive.

Bottom Line: A well engineered board, with very few flaws. Performance was excellent, and if stability is also a requirement, as it should be, it's tough to go wrong with the P4C800-E Deluxe.

If you have any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.

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