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Asus P4P8X Pentium 4 Motherboard Review

Thursday, January 7th, 2010 | Motherboard Reviews | Comments

Here’s a golden oldie. Released over 4 years ago this board is still available for those who want to add a new motherboard to a Pentium 4 system.

Old computers can last for a very, very long time and often get disposed of long before their capabilities run out and the components give up the ghost. This board solves one particular problem with very old boards, and that is the lack of upgrade capabilities.

But before we look at those, here’s a list of features:

• Pentium 4 support
• Two port SATA RAID
• 3 x PCI expansion card slots
• 1 x PCIe x16
• 8 x USB
• Onboard audio
• LAN port

I can honestly admit that I still run a Pentium 4 processor on my primary (and only) computer. It has been in service for 7 years. And still going strong.

I upgraded primarily to take advantage of SATA RAID. After my hard drive crashed and I lost all my data I realized that I needed some sort of RAID solution for safety’s sake. The upgraded motherboard had this as a built-in feature.

For an older P4 system this motherboard will allow the addition of a RAID setup and upgrade to a decent graphics card. The built-in features like audio and LAN can be some nice added extras too.

The pricing is not too low, but this product has been through the paces and come out a winner. With years of proven performance behind it, it’s guaranteed to work well.

Tags: Asus, motherboard, p4p8x, pentium 4, raid, sata

Intel DX38BT Motherboard with Intel X38 Chipset

Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 | Gaming Computer Reviews, Motherboard Reviews | Comments

The Intel DX38BT Motherboard is based on the Intel X38 Express chipset and designed to support the most cutting edge processors, and sports an impressive range of high performance features. The latest stuff is never cheap, and this motherboard is no exception, but it does give all you need to take advantage of new technologies. With support for DDR3, Quad-core and Extreme edition Intel processors and eSATA, it’s features allow the use of the latest products. The striking black gives the Intel DX38BT some good looks, fitting right in a gaming system box with a view of the inside. The LGA775 CPU socket is still there, but the rest of the board is the interesting part. Here are some of the features:

• Intel Core2 Extreme, Quad and Duo support
• 1333/1066/800 MHz FSB
• No integrated graphics
• Up to 8 GB of dual-channel DDR3 DIMMs (4 x 2 GB)
• HD audio
• Gigabit Ethernet support
• Up to 12 USB 2.0 ports
• Three PCIe x16
• Two firewire
• Six SATA ports with RAID

Even though this board is aimed at gamers, and by offering three PCIe x16 ports, it certainly caters to them, but the rest of the features offer almost everything you could need to start a computer. There is plenty of room for memory expansion, up to 8 GB, which is great for new games, but is also more than enough for any office application you’d like to throw at it. Up to four sticks are supported, but I hardly imagine that anything over a total of 4 GB would be necessary. HD audio, although common to many boards, is always a good extra, and with the quality offered, along with 7.1 channel audio and the ability to listen to two separate audio channels you’ll be able to listen to music and chat to your friends online at the same time. Gigabit Ethernet has not yet taken complete hold, but in looking forward it will certainly give a good amount of future-proofness, and allow very high speeds over networks that support it. Storage is handled by IDE and SATA. The standard two IDE ports are there, holding up the fort from times gone by, although I suspect they will be on their way out sometime soon, much like the ubiquitous serial ports and parallel port that are missing from this motherboard. The eSATA ports are certainly more useful than serial and parallel ports, which continue to be useful only in industry where dedicated machines have been running on them for decades. Six SATA ports with RAID will allow a combination of striped storage or mirrored storage, according to your needs. I love motherboards with lots of features and my only gripe with this one is the lack of onboard graphics. That said, I’d just invest in a cheap one considering all the features of the board itself. Although quite expensive, you get more than you need for any application, it has all the necessary features and more. I would recommend it for anyone considering the jump into the Core2 range.

Gigabyte M57SLI-S4 Motherboard

Thursday, June 15th, 2006 | Motherboard Reviews, News | Comments

The AM2 chipset which will be utilized by new AMD chips has seen quite a boost in popularity with at least a few motherboard manufacturers getting in on the action and making motherboards to suit. As for chipsets, well nVidia is still the maker of choice, being a close supporter of AMD.

The AM2 socket has 940 pins, but should not be confused with the 940 pin chips that AMD had a little while back, these have a different setup for the pins under the processor itself.

Besides the obvious support of AM2 processors, this board has quiet a few other features. It can suppot up to 8GB or DDR2 RAM. There are 2 PCIe slots, but they only work at 8x, meaning they are slightly slower than cards running on the more expensive chipset. The usual floppy drive connectors and hard drive connectors are in place, but there are also two sets of 3 SATA connectors.

High Definition Audio is the new standard in onboard audio and allows for much better quality from sound cards that are built into the motherboard.

In the full test at motherboards.org, they found the board to be a little slower that the ASUS board that they had for comparisson. The board itself is aimed at the mid-range. The nForce 570 SLI chipset is not as high-performance as its 590 counterpart, which is aimed at the enthusiast.

Check out the full article here.

Tyan Tempest i 5000XL S2692

Monday, June 12th, 2006 | Motherboard Reviews, News | Comments

Motherboards are not only for desktop computers and its easy to forget that there is also a huge market for motherboards in areas such as servers.

Motherboards for servers have a much differet focus that those used for desktop computers. The very nature of servers means that they are meeting the needs of many users at the same time, and so need to be designed differently.

More than one processor is very common in order to handle the number of processes created by being accessed by many users at the same time. A large amount of memory is also needed to handle this. Servers have often had more memory than most desktop computers. They also need to be secure, so use of things such as ECC memory help to ensure that nothing gets lost while it is in the computer.

Massive storage space is also common and this motherboard comes with 6 SATA2 slots, allowing for a lrage configuration of drives into an array, with RAID 0, 5 and 10 being supported. There is integrated audio, 4 USB ports and a LAN port for your convenience.

Two Intel LGA771 sockets allow the use of two Intel Xeon Dempsey/Woodcrest processors.

From the Tyan website:

High-end workstation performance comes to the entry-level market with the introduction of the Tempest i5000XL (S2692). Using Intel’s 5000X chipset, the Tempest i5000XL delivers support for (2) Intel® Xeon® 5000 and 5100 sequence processors; FBDIMM support; dual PCI Express x16 slots for SLI capability, as well as multiple PCI slots; built-in Audio, SATA2 with RAID, and onboard dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, all in an SSI CEB (12″ x 10.5″) compact form factor for mid to full-size tower configurations.

Although it may be entry-level it is still expensive compared to even the coolest of desktop motherboards, but you do get a helluva lot. It has SLI support if you need hardcore graphics and practically everything else you could need from a motherboard.

Check out the full preview at Phoronix

Gigabyte’s AM2 Boards (NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI & 570 SLI)

Wednesday, May 17th, 2006 | Motherboard Reviews, News | Comments

Hardwarezone takes a sneak peak at the 2 motherboards for the new socket AM2 from AMD. These boards are not in production yet, but give a glance at what to expect.

The AM2 will be compatible with current AMD chipsets because of the hypertransport technology remaining the same. The 940 pin chips will not be compatible with the older 940 pin layout that was used before.

The AM2 chips will include integrated DDR2 controllers, allowing them to use DDR2, rather than the older DDR, which they were stuck with using for such a long time.

Despite the compatibility with older chipsets, Nvidia have released the new 500-series chipsets to compliment the release of these new chips.

Both of these fully-features boards make good platforms on which to build a new computer based on the new AMD chips. Check them out to see how they look.

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