Chris Connolly van GamePC komt met een review van Asus' P4T-E moederbord, welke is gebaseerd op de i850 chipset voor Socket 478 Intel processoren. Dit bord ondersteunt zowel de Willamette als de Northwood Pentium 4. Er zijn vier RIMM sloten aanwezig, die maximaal gevuld kunnen worden met 2GB aan RDRAM. Daarnaast beschikt de plank over 5 PCI sloten, 1 CNR slot en een AGP Pro slot. De RDRAM Turbo mode die op de Pentium 4 moederborden van Asus zitten bleek bij de Sandra Memory Bandwidth test een performance-winst van 2 procent te geven. In de andere tests liggen de prestaties van de P4T-E op hetzelfde niveau als de andere Socket 478 moederborden of net iets hoger. Hieronder de conclusie:
After over a month of waiting, the Socket-478 version of the P4T is finally here. The P4T-E delivers on everything that made the P4T a great motherboard, and improves upon it. While the improvements are small, it doesn't diminish the fact that the P4T-E is undoubtedly the best Socket-478 platform on the market now. The P4T was the top selling and best performing Socket-423 Pentium 4 board out on the market, and no doubt we can expect that same sort of success with the P4T-E as the Pentium 4 continues to mature.
If everything stays on course, the Pentium 4’s manufacturing process will take a huge leap forward at the beginning of next year, as Intel transitions the Pentium 4 to a 0.13-micron architecture, from the quickly aging 0.18-micron we see in today’s P4 chips. If all the predictions about the "Northwood" Pentium 4 come true (512k on-die cache, 533 MHz FSB) come true, a Northwood combined with the P4T-E will make for an incredible performer. The P4T is already approved for the Northwood processor, although most likely a BIOS update will be needed to see the CPU's properly through the processor's CPUID.
What more can we say? The board was flawless throughout all our testing, performs great, and is rock solid stable. Asus undoubtedly has another winner on their hands. Hopefully Asus will allow some variants of this board to be made with integrated LAN/SCSI, as it would only make this great platform even better.
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Met dank aan Spice voor de tip.