ASUS P4T i850 Pentium 4 ATX Motherboard

Introduction

Back in November 2000, when Intel announced the release of the Pentium 4 1.4GHz and 1.5GHz CPUs, its high price and disappointing performance drove people away from buying the Pentium 4 for their systems.  The performance was barely on par with the Pentium III 1GHz and slower than the 1.2GHz AMD Athlon in most benchmarks, not to mention the fact that they were associated with a $1000 price tag.

Just last week Intel announced their new 1.7GHz Pentium 4 , which has put the Pentium 4 back near the top of the benchmarks.  As with any other new CPU launch, the price drops are not far behind, and the Pentium 4 is no exception. With the latest round of price cuts, the Pentium 4 is now much more reasonably priced. Of course, price drops on RDRAM and i850 motherboards have been happening gradually over the past few months as well

Ever since the debut of Pentium 4 we haven’t really looked at any individual motherboards using the i850 chipset, mainly because it seemed that nobody wanted a Pentium 4 in their system.  However, with the aforementioned price drops and the introduction of higher clocked chips, that’s all changing. That means it’'s time for us to start looking at what different manufacturers have to offer on the motherboard side of things. 

To kick off our series of i850 motherboard reviews, nothing could be better than a board from ASUS, the largest motherboard manufacturer in the world whose performance and reliability is well known within our community.  Their reputation is based on the numerous high quality and high performance motherboards they have produced, such as the A7V133 and the CUSL2.  Their products are welcomed by both OEM builders for their rock solid stability and by hardware enthusiasts for their overclocking ability.  Entering the Pentium 4 era, ASUS once again has their own unique solution, one that should live up to their reputation.

They called it, the P4T.