Asus P4T-E Up Close *Pic*

[Texmaster]

I've had a few PMs about the P4T-E complaining asus didn't make the pic large enough to see it and asked if I could take a shot of mine so I did.

Bear in mind this is a 1.5 meg file because it comes from a 3 megapixil camera.

Asus P4T-E Up Close

As far as the board goes, its pure asus rock solid quality.

 

[bmg]

I've had my P4T-E for a couple of weeks and agree that it's a great board. One cool feature is that it breaks the 16 interrupt limit. When used with Win2000 or WinXP more than 16 interrupts can be used. For example, my video card is using IRQ16, network card on IRQ18, USB on IRQ19, SB Audigy on IRQ20, 1394 card on IRQ21 and another USB on IRQ23. This is using WinXP with acpi enabled.

 

[damocles]

1.004 bios is up on the German Asus site (haven't checked others)

Anyone know if there is any way to get my Vcore max over 1.85V? I reckon if I could get to 1.95 I could get to 2.26Ghz

 

[RolyL]

Does the P4T-E genuinely break the 16 IRQ limit, so is it simply remapping existing entries and hiding the fact from the software? I thought it was a requirement to maintain backwards compatibility.

Why are the traces from the northbridge to the memory wiggly? Surely a straight path would make more sense?

 

[Diable]

Am I right in think that the P4T-E doesn't have all three P4 power connectors? I looked at the pic and I see the 12v 4pin and the ATX connector but I don't see the auxiliary power lead.

 

[Texmaster]

<< 1.004 bios is up on the German Asus site (haven't checked others)

Anyone know if there is any way to get my Vcore max over 1.85V? I reckon if I could get to 1.95 I could get to 2.26Ghz >>



Have you tried the 1.004?

Man I hope it helps the overclocking

 

[Texmaster]

<< Am I right in think that the P4T-E doesn't have all three P4 power connectors? I looked at the pic and I see the 12v 4pin and the ATX connector but I don't see the auxiliary power lead. >>



Yeah they are spread out but there still is 3.

One, in the middle of the board between the AGP slot and the motherboard chipset.

One, in the lower right in the pic just to the right of the secondary IDE channel.

And the last, the big sucker is in the upper right just south of the mouse and keyboard ps2 slots.

 

[LXi]

I really like the layout, Asus has generally been crap in laying out motherboards, but their P4 boards are different, the P4T-E has a very clean and economic design. Would've been better if they move the floppy connector to a better place, option for IDE RAID would be nice too.

 

[NOS440]

Texmaster your teasing me dude mine should be here in a few day's along with my 1.9 ghz P4. I really would of never upgraded but a neihbor bought me out of my 1.5 so I couldn't resist . Besides I need to get my clock speed up with the rest of you speed freaks LOL ! I also had to get me a GF T500 while I was at it

 

[NOS440]

LXi I personally prefer to use a Add in card for raid it makes it much safer to transfer all your data when changing motherboards. So onboard raid to me isn't a Issue.

 

[Texmaster]

<< I really like the layout, Asus has generally been crap in laying out motherboards, but their P4 boards are different, the P4T-E has a very clean and economic design. Would've been better if they move the floppy connector to a better place, option for IDE RAID would be nice too. >>



Agree on all points. I've had the Asus P2B-LS, K7V, CUSL2, P4T and now the P4T-E and this is the FIRST asus board that didn't put the ide channels next to each other! Thats the biggest improvement I've seen.

And yes IDE Raid should have been a given with a new motherboard.

 

[Texmaster]

<< Texmaster your teasing me dude mine should be here in a few day's along with my 1.9 ghz P4. I really would of never upgraded but a neihbor bought me out of my 1.5 so I couldn't resist . Besides I need to get my clock speed up with the rest of you speed freaks LOL ! I also had to get me a GF T500 while I was at it >>



Bingo! lol A guy at work bought my 1.7 and mobo thats why I'm upgrading

I think though for time being, my regular old geforce 3 will have to suffice

 

[damocles]

One thing I didn't like about it was the capacitors are so damn close to the mounting mechanism. Wasn't easy to mount an Igloo on it.

Re: 1004 bios, doesn't seem visibly any different to the 1.003 to me. 1.003 allowed for a 133FSB, but killed my ability to O/C more than 425Mhz

Re:Raid, onboard rain would certainly have been a nice option considering the features on the TH7 II and new Gigabyte board. The one feature I really want is the TH7's higher vCore potential (2v)

 

[Texmaster]

<< One thing I didn't like about it was the capacitors are so damn close to the mounting mechanism. Wasn't easy to mount an Igloo on it.

Re: 1004 bios, doesn't seem visibly any different to the 1.003 to me. 1.003 allowed for a 133FSB, but killed my ability to O/C more than 425Mhz

Re:Raid, onboard rain would certainly have been a nice option considering the features on the TH7 II and new Gigabyte board. The one feature I really want is the TH7's higher vCore potential (2v) >>



What P4 chip do you have and how far have you taken the fsb?

I have a 2.0 and the bios just freaks out if I try over 118 fsb for 3x and 115 for 4x

 

[bmg]

<<Does the P4T-E genuinely break the 16 IRQ limit, so is it simply remapping existing entries and hiding the fact from the software? I thought it was a requirement to maintain backwards compatibility.

Why are the traces from the northbridge to the memory wiggly? Surely a straight path would make more sense? >>

Asus claims their "Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller reduces interrupt sharing and improves performance" in Win2000 and WinXP. Remember that Win2000 and WinXP aren't limited by the old DOS core like the Win9x OS family, so backwards compatibility isn't an issue anymore.

On the wiggly traces, most high speed memory systems require matched trace lengths, so that's probably what it is.

 

[AndyHui]

All of the Intel i8xx series of chipsets contain an IO-APIC that allows the use of hardware IRQs above 16. Not only do you need chipset support, but you also need BIOS Support.

ASUS has incorporated IO-APIC support on boards released since the TUSL2 family.

The IO-APIC hardware interrupts are only supported by the ACPI HAL under Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Win9x and WinNT cannot take advantage of the IO-APIC. Almost all dual processor boards have full support for the IO-APIC as well; it's only recently that manufacturers have started supporting it on single processor systems.

IIRC, the basic IO-APIC implementation on the i8xx series of chipsets is 24 hardware IRQs. While Win2K and WinXP allows up to 255 virtual IRQs, I would rather the IO-APIC every time.