Asus PC-DL Deluxe review

The Xeon has been Intel's professional 32-bit processor for some time, but it has always been a bit pricey for the enthusiast. Not only is the CPU itself costly (£200 inc VAT just for a 2.4GHz model), but so are the motherboards (as much as £500), and they generally require the fault-tolerant but slower Registered ECC memory and special power supplies, further pushing the cost up.

Worst of all, you can't usually fiddle with the clock settings. Now, however, Asus has released a dual Xeon board for scarcely more than the best Pentium 4 ones, and it supports standard DDR memory. Best of all, as it's unique in using Intel's 875 chipset rather than the usual E7505, tweakage is also on the menu.

The PC-DL Deluxe is quite well endowed with features. On the backplane, you'll find four USB 2, Intel Gigabit Ethernet LAN, two serial, one printer, and one FireWire port, plus audio connections for the on-board SoundMAX six-channel audio. A further two USB 2, digital audio connections, a game port and an extra FireWire can be added via blanking plates, and there's another USB header spare for front connections if your case has them. The motherboard also has a pair each of ATA133 and Serial ATA ports, plus twin RAID Serial ATA ports. There's even a solitary ATA133 connection for RAID usage via the Promise controller.

Just in case this isn't enough, there are five PCI slots as well, but none are of the 64-bit variety. Best of all, the Asus can work with the 20-pin/4-pin power supplies used by regular Pentium 4 motherboards as well as the 24-pin/8-pin variant usually required by Xeon boards, so you won't have to invest in a PSU that's useless for other systems.

But for those considering the Xeon as a performance alternative, benchmark results are as important as features. For testing, we installed the PC-DL with a couple of the latest 3.06GHz Xeons sporting 1MB of Level 3 cache. We added 512MB of Corsair PC3200 DDR memory. As Xeons are still at 533MHz FSB, only PC2700 is required, but the PC3200 gave us leeway for overclocking - and E7505 only supports PC2100 so there's already an advantage from the 875 chipset. We added an ATi Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card in the AGP 8X Pro slot and installed the latest 3.9 Catalyst drivers. Annoyingly, the plastic heat sink fixings for the CPUs weren't in the box - just the baseplates to screw them into - so we had to scrounge these off another Xeon board to fit our Akasa 680Cu heatsinks.

Asus makes grand claims for automatic 'AI Overclocking', but we found this amounted to increasing the FSB in 1MHz increments. There aren't any voltage change options either. However, we still managed to push the FSB from 133MHz up to 153MHz, for a corking CPU frequency of 3.52GHz. When we ran our standard Newtek LightWave render test, even at the standard 133MHz FSB, the test finished in exactly eight minutes - 12 seconds faster than the dual 3.06GHz Xeon Boston 7033TR (see issue 106, p56). At 153MHz, this dropped to seven minutes, two seconds - 12 per cent faster. The 3DMark2001 SE results were equally impressive - 17,722 at 133MHz, and 19,186 at 153MHz (all tests run at 1,024 x 768).

Considering the £399 inc VAT price tag of a 512KB Level 3, 3.06GHz Xeon - twice that of a similarly specified Pentium 4 - Intel's professional processor is never going to be a cost-effective option. But with the PC-DL Deluxe, the rest of the added expense has been removed. Anyone who wants professional workstation performance by day and stonking gaming by night should buy this motherboard.

Author: James Morris