Tuesday, May 27, 2003

The THG editors bought a motherboard of the same name, Asus P4P800 (Rev. 1.02), in one of Germany's better known districts for computer retailers. While making an initial visual comparison of the two boards we noticed some clear differences between the press sample and the retail variant, although the same model name as well as board revision are indicated on both. On both of the boards, the latest BIOS (1006 Beta 010) was installed and tested with identical settings. The result we got was that the retail variant of the P4P800 is up to 11% slower than the press sample in the memory tests.

Wednesday, May 28, 2003

Early in the morning, we contacted Asus in Taiwan and asked them to make a statement regarding the differences between the seemingly identical boards. That same evening, Asus Taiwan posted a press release (which could originally be viewed here ):

At the same time, we contacted Intel USA and asked them for a statement on this. In the end, the question was whether the PAT technology of the 875 chipset (Canterwood) could also be activated with the 865PE chipset (Springdale). In the meantime, the statement from Asus was making its way around the globe. We concluded that Asus' press release was in stark opposition to what was specified in Intel's whitepapers on the 865 and 875 chipsets.