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Asus P5P800 Intel Socket 775 ATX Motherboard AGP 8X/4X

Saturday, December 17th, 2005 | Motherboard Reviews, Reviews

The Asus P5P800 could be an unsung hero when it comes to value for money and extreme features for a very good price. This board has the priviledge of having all the features you could need from a motherboard with all the things you could need to do anything you really want with your computer.

Overclocking a Pentium 530 to over 6GHz and over 5.4GHz stable are among some of the great things the ASUS P5P800 can do. Although not all people want to go into overclocking a boards ability to go way beyond what its specs say is a sure sign that a lot of quality is what you are gettting.

Feature list…

• Socket 775 for Intel Pentiums and Celerons
• Intel 865PE northbridge chipset
• AGP 4X/8X graphics slot
• Gigabit LAN and built-in audio
• DDR dual channel memory slots (2 dual-channel pairs)
• SATA headers

The ASUS P5P800 offers all the features of a modern board without the exorbitant cost associated with getting a high range motherboard with all the features you need. Being capable of supporting all of Intels Pentium 4 and Celeron processors makes it a good bet for those looking to put together a mid-range computer for less than a thousand bucks with everything included.

Dual channel memory is a good feature, though make sure to get the memory in pairs as your DDR modules have to be a dual-channel pair to get the approximate 10% increase in performance that they generally manage to offer. The motherboard can support up to 4GB of memory by installing 4 sticks of 1GB DDR.

The Intel northbridge and southbridge provide enough performance and features and are a reliable pair.

Although the board is on its way out in terms of the latest technology there is still a lot of room for people who are still buying Pentiums that came out more than a year ago and upgrading systems that have these already. The biggest plus is that it has all the peripheral devices that are needed for the other parts that have come out.

SATA provides ability to use the latest and fastest hard drives around, and if you have ATA drives then they are still supported as usual. USB 2.0 is a standard feature for modern motherboards, although this board does not have a Firewire port, but not surprising as this really is often seen as a high end add-on.

AGP 4X/8X graphics slot can be seen two ways. If you have a cool older card that happens to use AGP you can still keep it and upgrade your motherboard, however AGP will be phased out sooner or later, so if you want to keep upgrading graphics cards, you would have to upgrade the board again.

Overall this board is an absolute monster in terms of performance and value. The ASUS P5P800 has everything you could need at a great price of only a hundred bucks or so. I would recommend it to anyone who needs to newer features of motherboard like SATA but does not want to do away with the rest of their system, or for those looking for a great value computer with a little bit of kick.

Pros

• Great price
• Absolutely awesome performance in terms of speed
• Fully featured
• Best choice for upgrading a slightly older system

Cons

• No Firewire
• No PCIe

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