Asus P4T Pentium 4 i850 Motherboard
Beyond Intel's Reference Design

By Dave Altavilla
12/19/00
 

Here is a run down on our test system for this evaluation.
 

Test System Asus inside

- Asus P4T Motherboard with Pentium 4 Processor @ 1.5GHz.

- Intel D850GB Motherboard with Pentium 4 Processor @ 1.5GHz.

- 256MB of Samsung PC800 RAMBUS DRDRAM,

- IBM DTLA307030 30Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive - Supplied by Outside Loop!

- nVidia GeForce 2 Ultra 64MB AGP Graphics Card,

- Intel 100tx PCI NIC, 56K PCI Modem

- Sound Blaster Live Sound Card,

- Hitachi DVD ROM Drive,

- WindowsME 

- Direct X 8.0 and nVidia reference drivers version 7.17

- Intel chipset drivers version 2.60a

Benchmarks With The Asus P4T Raising the bar somewhat

These SiSoft Sandra scores report excellent performance at all levels for the Asus P4T.  The CPU clock is reported at about 10MHz. faster than its actual setting in the BIOS.  This leads us to believe that Asus took a slightly aggressive approach to the timing of this board yet it still yields good stability as we reported earlier.  The overclocked score shows you the sizable headroom that the P4T has along with the Pentium 4 at higher clock speeds.  In each case, the P4T bested the reference system. 

Next we have some our Business Winstone and more taxing Content Creation Winstone tests.

The Asus P4T, turns out good performance and is on par with the Intel i850 reference board in these tests.  Once again however, we show you the benefits of over-clocking here.  Substantial gains were realized with excellent performance

Finally, just a quick check with respect to Gaming/Graphics performance. 

The Pentium 4 is King of the Hill in our book, when it comes to Quake 3 performance.  You just can't buy a faster system for gaming these days.  The Asus P4T puts up fantastic scores here but there is always a price to pay for performance.  This makes for a nice lead in to our final assessment. 

The lowest price that we could find the Asus P4T on various net shopping search engines, was about $300. Couple that with a 1.4GHz. Pentium 4 at about $600 and some RAMBUS memory at $200-$300 and you are looking at a $1200 base price before you even get into to peripherals.  This is a steep entry level price point for any "build it yourself" type or for someone looking at a bare bones solution from a Systems Integrator.  In short, there are just better values in the market place right now, than the Pentium 4.

On the other hand, if you are the type that demands the utmost in performance, an Asus P4T and Pentium 4 setup will not disappoint you.  There is simply nothing faster on the market right now.  However,  that window is closing fast as clock speeds for AMD solutions creep up and DDR SDRAM comes into the mainstream.  And so the battle rages on.

The P4T is a VERY high quality board with very few short comings.  It's stability was top notch as was its ability to over-clock our Pentium 4 well out of spec.  In addition, the folks at Asus also went the extra mile helping to ease the pain of conversion to this new platform with their innovative motherboard converter back plate.  We are sure this adds to the cost over all but if you have a standard ATX case this will allow you to avoid any modifications or a new case all together.  Do we recommend the P4T?  You bet we do.  If you are heading down the Pentium 4 path it is great foundation on which to build yourself a machine that will leave your colleges green with envy but will also tap some "green" from your pocket.

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