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Asus P5P800 Motherboard / Socket 775 / 865PE

Friday, January 27th, 2006 | Motherboard Reviews, Reviews

Asus P5P800 is a very powerful motherboard that can energize even the most innovative PCs and can boast the all round performance of any normal computer system. This model offers nearly all the latest features in sockets, chipsets, slots, ports and pins. If you want to experience the speed of LGA775 CPU yet worried about the price, Asus P5P800 can be your solution.

The Asus P5P800 motherboard with its myriad of innovative technologies like Asus Hyper Path technology, AI NOS, Sound Blaster Upgrades, AL Net2, Dual-Channel DDR400 and Al Audio offers good stability and incredible performance to any computer.

Here is a listing of the main features:

• Socket 775
• Intel 865PE chipset
• Four 184-pin DDR SDRAM memory slots
• 8X/4X AGP slot
• Support up to four UltraDMA 100/66/33 devices
• A Gigabit LAN chip and a back panel LAN port
• AC ’97 Sound CODEC

The Asus P5P800 motherboard stops you from paying double for other world-class featured boards. The Zero Insertion Force [ZIF] socket allows easy processor installation, and also helps in upgrading the processor. The Intel 865PE Northbridge chipset and Intel ICH5 Southbridge chipset support the Intel Pentium 4/Celeron processors with FSB frequency of 533 or 800 MHz.

The P5P800 IDE controller can support up to four UltraDMA 133 devices and the AC ’97 Sound CODEC [Realtek] can support high quality 6 channel audio systems. The integrated 6-channel audio is a great benefit because you don’t have to invest in a seperate sound card. Plus the sound is not bad.

The Asus P5P800 also supports SATA. This specification allows spaces for more slender and flexible cables with lower pin counts, reduced voltage requirements and up to 150 MB/s data transfer rates. It doesn’t, however, have SATA2, which doubles that throughput.

The Gigabit LAN chip provides a back panel LAN port. The Ethernet 1000Mbps LAN Network Connections provide the highest quality Ethernet performance for speed users who need direct network connectivity. Pretty much a standard feature to get LAN capability, but the 1000Mbps keeps you up to speed so you can enjoy the fastest possible speed, if they are available.

The AGP 4x/8x is a mixed blessing. Although not up to the higher speeds of PCIe, it does allow you to use any of those older cards that you have lying around, or that you are possibly still using.

Overall the motherboard can add some oomph to an older system. With the newer socket you might have to upgrade your old processor, but you can at least salvage those cool graphics cards.