Asus P4G8X Deluxe

If you're thinking about building a new PC or upgrading your current system to accommodate Intel's latest 3.06GHz Pentium 4 with Hyper-Threading, you'll need a suitably high-spec motherboard. And seeing as Intel's hottest Pentium 4 costs a small fortune, you may as well buy a well-featured board too. Two strong contenders are Asus and Gigabyte, with special versions of their new Intel E7205-based motherboards.

AOpen's AX4R Plus (see Reviews, issue 100, p125) already hinted at the performance potential of Intel's latest E7205 chipset. This new core logic brings the Intel chipset family up to date with two significant additions; namely, AGP 8x and dual-channel DDR266 memory support. Dual-DDR is the more interesting of the two, providing a Rambus-rivalling 4.2GB/sec of bandwidth from relatively inexpensive memory modules. Four DIMM sockets are provided on both boards, accommodating up to 4GB of RAM. Intel retains the ICH4 south bridge from the 845E chipset, which provides the requisite USB 2 and Ultra ATA/100 controllers.

The Asus P4G8X Deluxe adds to the base specification with a significant arsenal of extra features. There's no IDE RAID controller, but Silicon Image's Sil 3112 provides two Serial ATA 1 channels and support for Serial ATA RAID-0 and -1, ready to take advantage of the new Serial ATA disks due for release early in 2003. Broadcom's BCM5702 provides Gigabit Ethernet, which is another popular inclusion on many high-end motherboards, and Realtek's ALC650 handles the on-board audio duties.

Asus also provides a backplate with coaxial S/PDIF in and out. Four USB 2 ports line the backpanel, with an additional two provided by a backplate, which also features a game port. A third backplate adds two FireWire ports. Expansion is catered for by five PCI slots, one of which is a proprietary BlueMagic PCI slot that supports the Asus SpaceLink B&W wireless card, featuring 802.11a/b and Bluetooth.

If you thought the Asus was well featured, Gigabyte's GA8INXP Limited Edition could almost be described as over-featured. Gigabyte has chosen to support both IDE and Serial ATA RAID using two separate controllers - a Sil 3112 for Serial ATA RAID and a Promise PDC20276 for IDE RAID. This is slightly overkill, as the latest Promise PDC20376 does a similar job in half the chips. That said, the two extra Ultra ATA/133 RAID channels can be used individually to support up to four extra IDE devices. Gigabyte also provides a backplate with two Serial ATA sockets for hot-plugging.

Gigabit Ethernet is integrated too, this time courtesy of Intel, and Realtek's ALC650 is again on hand to provide audio, supplemented by a backplate with optical and coaxial S/PDIF plus sub/centre and rear analog outputs. I was surprised at the lack of FireWire support considering the high-end spec, but there are six USB 2 ports. Five PCI slots provide plenty of room for card expansion.

So far this isn't too outlandish, but the 8INXP's final feature is extraordinary. Recognising the increasing popularity of overclocking, Gigabyte has added a supplementary power module that slots in beside the CPU. The module supports a standard three-phase power mode, which can be used either in parallel with the main PSU to provide six-phase power or as a backup in case the main PSU fails. The backup mode is certainly useful, although we expect dedicated overclockers will already own a powerful six-phase main PSU and therefore have no need for it. The power module also comes with a blue LED fan directed at the CPU to provide extra cooling.