P4C800-E dlx

I was searching on neweggs site and found this:

"ASUS Motherboard for Intel Pentium 4 / Celeron Processors, 800Mhz FSB Model# P4C800-E DELUXE Retail
Specifications:
Supported CPU478 Pentium 4 / Celeron
Chipset: Canterwood 875P + ICH5R
FSB:800/533/400 MHz
RAM:2 Channel (dual channel) DDR400/333/266 Max 4GB
IDEual Ultra DMA ATA100/66 up to 4 Devices
RAID: Dual Channel 133/100/66/33 up to 4 Devices & SATA
Slots:1x AGP (8X) 5x PCI
Ports:2xPS2, 1xCOM,1xLPT,1x Audio, 1xLAN,2x IEEE, 8xUSB20
Onboard Audio:AD 1985 6 Channel Codec
Onboard LAN:Intel CSA Gigabit LAN 1000/100
Onboard SATA: Dual Channel Serial ATA up to 150MBs
Onboard Firewire: 2 1394 Firewire ports
built-in Intel PAT (Intel Performance Acceleration Technology) It helps to boost performance by 3~5%. Model#: P4P800-E Deluxe Special Free FedEx Saver "


It looks like a P4C800 that now has ICH5R. It looks like it just came out too as they don't have any in stock and are expecting them. Is this suppose to be the newer version of the P4C800 dlx that had a few problems? Is this Asus's updated board? Anybody know anything else about it?

ohhhhhh loooks promising

<-- asus fanboy

very exciting. look at the sheer size of the passive heatsink on that sucker too woohoo. package looks a little better then the springdale package. 4 sata cables instead of 2. looks like some kinda of T connectors for the serial power connectors and a few usb toys. not the best but not bad either.

hehe almost trigger fingered the buy button anyway.

Never heard of this board. the regular p4c800 (non-deluxe) has ICH5R as well. It hasnt reached usa yet tho. This doesnt look like it since its a deluxe..looks like they are creating a new revised model.

i hate asus now
p4c800e has CSA
and p4p800 have PAT

What is CSA??
Thats seems to be the only real upgrade on the "E" version.

This is nothing new - it just hasn't hit north america yet.

gruvin2 said:

What is CSA??
Thats seems to be the only real upgrade on the "E" version.

Click to expand...

It also has the ICH5R southbridge. So no more jank Promise Raid. I'm not sure on what CSA is though.

Sorry for being behind the times... it sure is new news to me..

CSA is Gigabit Network routed through a special bus denoted by CSA rather than bogging down the PCI Bus. It is also able to reach even higher maxes for throughput (even though its highly unlikely you can saturate gigabit ethernet on either pci or csa). Hope this helps unconfuse things for ya.

phpguru

thanks for the info phpguru. So its more for stuff to come rather then now. I don't know many that push there PCI bus. Also is the bus any larger then PCI or just another "freeway" to use?

From Anandtech:

CSA: ooh look, a new Bus
Gigabit Ethernet is slowly but surely becoming the standard that replaces 100Mbit Ethernet on high performance desktops and workstations everywhere. The problem that exists however is that most of these high performance desktops and workstations only have 32-bit 33MHz PCI slots which, if you do the math, ends up being exactly 1Gbps of bandwidth.

Now if you're transferring only in one direction and you have nothing else eating into that 1Gbps of PCI bus bandwidth, then you're not bandwidth limited at all by the PCI bus, but chances are that this perfect world we just described isn't too realistic in your work environment.

Most of the time you're transferring in two directions, and assuming you're connected to a full duplex switch, you're dealing with a peak of 2Gbps of bandwidth. At the same time, you've usually got some disk activity going on in the background among other things that make it clear that 1Gbps of bandwidth isn't going to cut it for some current and most future usage scenarios with Gigabit Ethernet.

Intel saw the bandwidth limitation to current desktop/workstation Gigabit Ethernet deployments and wanted to make their Gigabit solutions more attractive by introducing a new bus to the MCH - the Communications Streaming Architecture (CSA) bus. We're actually giving the bus a little too much credit by calling it new, this is actually a virtually identical copy of a bus that's been present in Intel MCH's for quite some time; the CSA bus is nothing more than a copy of Intel's Hub Link 2.0 bus that connects the MCH to the ICH (aka South Bridge), but instead, this bus is used to connect the MCH to Intel's Gigabit Ethernet controller.

The CSA bus is perfectly matched for Gigabit Ethernet as it offers a total of 2Gbps of bandwidth (266MB/s, equal to that of the Hub Link 2.0 bus because they are two separate but identical links), which is enough for full duplex Gigabit transfers.



In order to test the usefulness of Intel's CSA we setup a client/server setup composed of one server and two clients all going through a D-Link Gigabit switch using Category-6 cabling. All three systems made use of Intel Gigabit Ethernet controllers; we used Intel Pro/1000 Desktop MT controllers (see top right) in the clients and alternated between another Pro/1000 Desktop controller and the on-board CSA controller (see top left) for the server. Using NetIQ Chariot we generated bidirectional traffic between each client and the server to attempt to saturate the full-duplex Gigabit Ethernet link to the 875P equipped server. Here are the results we came about:

Gigabit Ethernet Performance
Communications Streaming Architecture vs. Conventional PCI Link (Throughput in Mbps)
CSA Bus

PCI Bus



1392

824



|
0 |
278 |
557 |
835 |
1114 |
1392 |
1670





As you can see, Intel's CSA does deliver as promised, although you have to keep in mind that transfer rates this high are impossible if you're reading data off of a hard drive. If you're sending data that's already cached in main memory then you'll be able to reach these sorts of transfer rates, otherwise there will be minimal peak transfer rate differences between a CSA Gigabit interface and a conventional PCI Gigabit interface. There's one thing for sure, with a CSA Gigabit interface, your network performance is entirely disk limited.

Even if you're not getting higher transfer rates, moving bandwidth-heavy traffic off of the PCI bus helps to ensure that other transactions occurring on the bus remain uninterrupted by bursts of network traffic. The end result is similar to what NVIDIA was able to achieve using isochronous Hyper Transport channels with nForce2, in that you get uninterrupted network data transfers and minimize the impact of sudden bursts of data on the rest of the system.

The addition of the CSA bus means that the MCH now has the following links stemming from it:

- 32-bit AGP 8x interface
- 2 x 64-bit ECC DDR memory interfaces
- 64-bit NetBurst FSB interface
- 16-bit Hub Link ICH interface
- 16-bit CSA interface

The addition of the CSA bus along with the two 64-bit memory buses are what make the 875P chipset the largest desktop chipset to date with over 1000 balls connecting the MCH to the motherboard.

Excellent read TC, thanks for breaking it down. Was very informative.

Alright Thats it... I'm getting one of these to see what they can do.

Well It's on it's way with a 2.8C and 1G of Corsair 3500.

Let us know how the perform for you guys as well!!

gruvin2 said:

Excellent read TC, thanks for breaking it down. Was very informative.

Click to expand...

hey gruvin2, I noticed that you have 2x512mb Buffalo pc3700 running 267fsb at 5:4. I think your P4 2.4C can go higher. Did you hit a wall with that memory? Reason I asked is because I have 512mb Buffalo pc3200 and I am pondering on buying the P4C800-E dlx. But I am shooting for 280+ fsb. I've already hit a wall at 265fsb with my P4P800 dlx and I know my 2.4C can go higher.

I got one of these boards the other day running 2.4c ES at 3.2ghz 1066FSB with 2xTWinmos3200 @DDR424.....
One thing I wanted to say was that this still has the Promise S-ATA RAID controller and not an Intel one, yet it states in the specs it should have ICH5-R with the Intel controller, maybe it has both?

If it has the promise controller than you didn't get a P4C800-E you got a dlx version.

markodude said:

I got one of these boards the other day running 2.4c ES at 3.2ghz 1066FSB with 2xTWinmos3200 @DDR424.....
One thing I wanted to say was that this still has the Promise S-ATA RAID controller and not an Intel one, yet it states in the specs it should have ICH5-R with the Intel controller, maybe it has both?

Click to expand...

The P4C800-E Dlx comes with ICH5R SATA x 2 AND Promise SATA x 2. See official specs . If you have a black nb heatsink, then you have the 'E'.

Thanks for the feedback on your ram. Do you mind pushing your rig little further for just a short time? Say, 280fsb(1120) and set your memory timing to 3:2. All I need to know is if it will post and boot into Windows at that fsb. No need to test stability. Thanks. If you don't feel comfortable, that's ok.