Asus P4P800-E Deluxe (i865PE Springdale)
Expansion options
On board the P4P800-E, there is a Promise PDC20378 RAID controller with simultaneous support for ParallelATA (1 channel) and SerialATA (two channels).
As a result, the user can plug in 4 hard disks and merge them into a RAID array of level 0, 1or 0+1. Besides, one more RAID array can be arranged with the functionality of the south bridge ICH5R, which besides ParallelATA offers support for two SerialATA channels.
Ten (!) hard disks can be plugged in to Asus P4P800-E Deluxe altogether: 6 disks through the Parallel-ATA, with 4 more through the SerialATA.
Then, the board offers support for eight USB ports: four ports on the rear panel, with 4 more plugged in via headers (the board comes bundled with only 1 header for 2 ports).
While the new South bridge ICH5 provides support for all the 8 USB ports, Asus engineers had to install an additional VIA VT6307 chip to enable support for the Firewire serial bus. As a result, P4P800-E acquired two Firewire ports, one of which is mounted on the rear panel, with the other one connected with a header (put in the package bundle).
And the most exciting feature - the Asus P4P800-E offers integrated 8-channel audio on the base of the ALC850 codec made by Advance Logic.
Besides, the board offers a high-speed Marvell - 88E8001 (Gigabit Ethernet) LAN controller.
It is plugged in to the north bridge directly - via the dedicated CSA bus (Intel Communications Streaming Architecture). This makes the P4P800-E stand out among, P4P800 and P4C800 in which the Gigabit LAN chip was plugged in via a PCI bus.
A few more words about the very interesting feature - AI Net. Basically, this is a diagnostic utility that allows to determine the network section in which a cable breakdown occurred or which pair of wires happened to get damaged. The utility operation range = 100 meters (i.e. just within this distance it's possible to locate the spot of rupture).
Now take a look at the board's rear panel. Note the grey audio connector - lateral speakers to the 8-channel audio system are plugged in.
It is easy to see that there is no second COM port (in its stead, there are optical and coaxial SP/DIF outputs). Besides, there is not GAME port. Both ports should be implemented with headers, (GAME - available in the bundle, no COM).
Traditionally, a jumpers layout diagram:
The Asus P4P800-E offers quite a few jumpers: the USBPW12-USBPW78 is meant to control the wake-up from an USB device, the KBPWR respectively for wake-up on a keyboard signal, the CLRTC is a jumper that is used to clear the CMOS (near the battery cell).
Now let's take a look at the additional features implemented in the P4P800-E.
First, this is the Asus POST Reporter. I have repeatedly mentioned the limitations of this feature: indistinct pronunciation, two small number of tests etc.
But the other feature - CrashFree BIOS - appears to be of much more use. It allows updating the system with a new BIOS version from a diskette. Besides, on the Asus P4P800-E board there is a new (second in turn) version of this feature - now the board's BIOS can be updated from a CD as well. We can discuss a long time regarding the advantages of this function, but what matters is that now we can safely experiment and tamper with BIOS update (even from within Windows) and even delegate this procedure to the common user :).
By the way, the CrashFree BIOS 2 is not the only function that allows operating the CD drive before loading the operating system. There is also the "Instant Music" feature implemented on Asus P4P800-E which turns the computer to a music CD player. The player program is hardcoded in the BIOS and to start it up, no operating system has to be loaded.
Reminding it that the board comes shipped with a set of stickers attached on keys like "forward", "reverse", "play", "stop" etc.
The set of functions - POST Reporter, CrashFree BIOS 2 and Q-Fan was dubbed by Asus marketing people as Ai Bios.
Now on to the BIOS settings.
 |
Content: |
 |
|
|
Top Stories: |
|
 |
|
MoBo:
|
|
|
|
VGA Card:
|
|
|
|
CPU & Memory:
|
|
|
