We were lucky to receive three different motherboards for this test. The one from Intel was the 'D850 GB' aka 'Garibaldi':

Then Asus supplied us with its P4T motherboard that shipped with this funky metal plate, making the motherboard box three times as heavy as usual.

Finally Gigabyte was also sending us their Pentium 4 platform called 'GA-8TX'.

Each of the three platforms performed reliably. Only Asus supplied us with a brand new 'performance' BIOS which made the P4T our fastest P4-board. It also offered excellent overclocking features, which is why I decided to make the P4T our Pentium 4 test platform for this article.