De mannen van HardOCP kregen het nieuwe Asus P4PE moederbord in handen en maakten er zo snel mogelijk een review over. De P4PE is met de i845PE-chipset één van de eerste planken die geschikt voor Intel's HyperThreading technologie, ook al kon dit niet gereviewed worden omdat er geen Pentium 4 met HT voorhanden was. Het mobo van Asus draagt naast HT verder nog een keur aan fijne features met zich mee, zoals USB 2.0, FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet en Serial ATA. Qua prestaties kwam de P4PE niet voorbij de concurrentie voor zover men kijkt naar het Pentium 4 platform. Als eenmaal de eerste HT-enabled Pentium 4's op de markt verschijnen, dan heeft Asus echter met de P4PE een hele goede troef in handen, aldus HardOCP:
Overall performance was on par with other Pentium 4 solutions although I did expect to see somewhat better scores. I believe the full potential of the P4PE goes unrealized at this time because features like Serial ATA are not able to be fully utilized along with Hyper-Threading performance going untested at this time until HT enabled processors come out of Intel. Still, DDR333 was needed on the Intel chipset platform and we did not think they were going to work miracles with it...as we are sure they are waiting for dual channel DDR to do that.
The board was extremely solid, performed extremely well and I have no problems with recommending it for you if it suits your needs. Interestingly enough, Kyle was testing another Asus P4PE while I was working on mine. You can see more P4PE benchmarks at 2.8GHz over in his 2800+ article. I think he snuck those in there before the i845PE launch hoping no one would notice.
What I do see here today, I liked. The P4PE will definitely have to make a return to the HardOCP test bench when we see our first Hyper-Threading CPU’s roll out and give this board a chance to really show its stuff. It only stands to reason that the ability to “multi-task”, even if not fully utilized by the application and OS, will definitely show a benefit in the benchmarks. So, if you're a man who likes to plan for the future, the P4PE is definitely a board you'll want in your system…I’m betting on it.
