June 2003 High-end Gaming PC Buyer's Guide - Page 3

Pentium 4 Motherboard: ASUS P4P800 Deluxe

Current Cost: $145
Months on list: New
Price Change: N/A

While we saw the mass influx of 875P-based motherboards last month, this month there have been a number of lower-cost boards using the 865P/PE series chipset. The 865PE series chipset is geared towards the mid to high-end crowd with support for dual-channel memory and 800MHz FSB CPUs. This month our Intel-based board uses this chipset, and is packed full of features.

While there hasn't been a whole lot of movement on the CPU front, there have been quite a few motherboard introductions this past month. One of the new motherboards introduced is the ASUS P4P800 Deluxe. Based on the 865PE chipset, this motherboard has support for 800MHz FSB Pentium 4 CPUs, dual-channel memory, and two serial ATA connecters. As usual, ASUS also has a plethora of overlocking BIOS options including very fine Vcore adjustments as well as a lot of FSB headroom. At $145 this board is very reasonably priced considering the amount of features it comes with.

Athlon XP Motherboard: ASUS A7N8X Deluxe nForce2 Motherboard

Current Cost: $128
Months on list: 2
Price Change: +$6

Until we see the release of AMD's Athlon 64 CPU we are most likely not going to see many new motherboards for socket A based boards. As such, we will recommend the excellent ASUS A7N8X Deluxe nForce2-based board. In addition to dual-channel memory controller, and 400MHz FSB support, the deluxe version of this board comes with an extra Ethernet controller (3COM), a Serial ATA controller, extra USB 2.0 Ports, IEEE 1394a support, and the more powerful MCP-T Southbridge that features the NVIDIA SoundStorm Audio Processor Unit (APU). Unfortunately, the price of this model actually increased slightly, but still remains at a very reasonable $128.

When purchasing an A7N8X make sure that you pick up a revision 2.0 motherboard sporting the new 400 Ultra tag. These boards are rated at 400MHz FSB speeds, and are the best to operate an Athlon XP 3200+ on. However, if you are a user of the 1.0x revision series, ASUS has updated the BIOS to version 1004 which includes support for 400MHz FSB CPUs, and although we have not fully tested this update at this time, initial reports seem promising.