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| ASUS P4C800 (Canterwood) Very Promising | ||
| (Review by MS, April 30, 2003) |
Summary
Every mainboard manufacturer of rank is rushing to market with their incarnation of i875-based mainboard to grab a piece of the pie while it is still hot. Among the heavy weights, one might have guessed it, is ASUSTek with their P4C800. As nice as the Canterwood architecture is per se, there are a few minor problems, for example, the lack of RAID1 support and some performance issues on the PATA ports branching off the ICH5-R.
As a conservative one size fits all solution, ASUS ships the P4C800 with the standard, non-RAID ICH5 supplemented with the Promise PDC20378 SATA multiconfiguration RAID controller, supporting RAID0, 1 and 01. At first glance, this PCI bus-based configuration appears somewhat counterintuitive but we have the benchmarks to show what is really going on.
A "shocking" development is the use of an AMI BIOS on the P4C800, featuring abundant possibilities for configuration of e.g. the AGP voltage but lacking any Vre increments beyond 1.6V. We have more on that story, too.
New features of the board in general can be described by the term Artificial intelligence, moreover, there is a lot to be said about the overclocking capabilities of the board, more than this opener will hold.
Since the original posting of this review, there have been several updates, most importantly, though, the FSB hole between 165 and 199 MHz has been fixed with the 003 BIOS revision.
With the launch of the i875 chipset, also known as Canterwood, Intel made some rather radical changes in the overall design of the system platform. Communication Streaming Architecture not as a competitor but as a complement to SATA as the I/O interface of the future is a pretty radical change of concept from the old and established separation of NorthBridge a.k.a. memory controller hub and South Bridge a.k.a. I/O controller hub. All of a sudden, the network I/O is uncoupled from the rest of the I/O world and pugs directly into the MCH to free up all bandwidth for the ATA interface.
The P4C800 is part of the new "Artificial intelligence" series of ASUS mainboards
There is a little black spot on the sun today... in order to use the CSA networking technology, it is necessary to use a Gigbit controller that actually supports it and the only controller that supports CSA is Intel's own Gigabit controller.
There is another little black spot on the sun today, that spot is the fact that the RAID version of the ICH5, that is the ICH5-R only supports RAID0. For performance daredevils risking the double-jeopardy of drive failure, this is acceptable as long as no critical data are stored on the drives, for most other customers, a pure RAID0 setup is not really the way to go.
The Deus Ex Machina comes in form of either the Silicon Image S3112R or else the Promise PDC20378 SATA RAID controller. The problem is that this solution, paired with any high speed drives will only be advantageous for a RAID1 setup since the SATA specifications of a single drive already exceed the bandwidth back-end of the add-on controller plugged into the PCI bus.
None of this really matters oif there are two RAID-capable controllers on the board, leaving the user with the choice of either going fast or else using the Promise controller for a backup drive of the ICH5 R RAID0. This would still be nice but .....
We'll go into the details later.
It was quite foreseeable that there would be a flood of Canterwood boards hitting the market as soon as the embargo was lifted and, of course, getting market share, especially with a known good Intel chipset lives by the major rule of first come first serve. Therefore, we cannot be surprised that everybody is competing with everybody else and their cousins to be the first to market and grab the first wave of customers that have been holding back in anticipation of the latest and greatest, as long as it lasts.
What we have on today's plate is none other than the ASUS P4C800. From our past experience, ASUS has always prevailed where others failed whether it was the AMD760 chipset or anything else. Of course, noblesse oblige and the legacy of being perfect is sometimes a heavy burden to carry. So how does the P4C800 fit into this New World Order?
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