P4P800-MX

The Asus P4P800-MX is a mini-ATX board is loosely the successor to the popular P4P800-VM board that is no longer manufactured.

This board has three 33MHz PCI slots and will fit into most small-footprint ATX cases such as the AOpen 350 series.

The board is based on the Intel 865GV chipset which offers on-board everything except for firewire and infrared. Digital Audio out is available through an optional header.

The on-board video is the Intel Extreme Graphics 2 series which is acceptable for most applications, including high-resolution use, but don't expect it to be able to play Doom3 with any sense of speed unless you get an aftermarket video card.

More tech specs for this board can be found here: http://au.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=12&l3=34&model=185&modelmenu=1

In general use, the board is excellent. Marry it with some good DDR400 RAM and Windows XP moves very slick.

As a server, Windows Server 2000 and Server 2003 work very well, although they do a better job with 1GB or more of RAM.

This board also runs Fedora Core Linux 3 and 4 flawlessly without the need of additional drivers. Combined with a Highpoint Rocketraid 1640 controller and I've built some Lotus Domino and Web servers using these boards that don't break a sweat for very little outlay. Running 24/7 for over a year, these boards have proven to be very reliable.

The board supports dual-channel memory access switching from 333MHz to 400MHz using two sticks of DDR400 RAM and the difference is definitely noticable. I have used Kingston DDR400 RAM on these boards in 256MB and 512MB flavours (times 2 for dual-channel access), and the board has performed exceptionally.

At an average price of $95, this is a highly recommended board for a cheap, but powerful gaming system and is more than adequate as a serious-application desktop platform for an office environment, or even as a mid-range server.

Can you use this board to upgrade an older system to give it a bit more performance?

Yes, you can! At work, I had several old Pentium 4 @ 1.6GHz/533MHz FSB machines that we were just about ready to throw out because their performance was abysmal. As an experiment, we purchased a P4P800-MX board and some replacement RAM (2x256MB Kingston DDR400), put the original CPU, floppy, CD-ROM and HDD back in and saw a HUGE jump in system performance. About the only thing holding the system back now was the slow-speed 20GB HDD's we had on them, but the initial speed increase rejuvenated these machines enough that we have "recycled" them to be Internet Cafe PC's. Our outlay was minimal - $95 for the board and $75 per stick for the RAM. We couldn't have been happier.