Dave_s said:
I would like to talk to TECH SUPPORT or SALES at ASUS USA about
their P4P800-E Deluxe and P4C800-E Deluxe mobos.
I must not be looking at the correct docs.
Carefully reading the docs I am not still not sure about the following:
Do either/both mobo provide a floppy service?
Do both provide 2 serial ports, com1 and com2?
Does the PROMISE UDMA133 controller allow 2 parallel ATA hdd's?
Is there also 2 parallel UDMA100 HDD channels, 4 HDDs, on
a Primary and Secondary channels?
All phone numbers I see do not look like toll free.
Toll free phone numeber?
Thank you,
Dave_S
General answers:
Phone support - toll call - no freebees. But, when tech support
is busy, they actually do call-backs occasionally, on their dime.
The record so far, is someone was on the phone with them for 1.5hr
or so. They won't necessarily try to run up your phone bill. Filling
out their tech support web page in advance, will allow them to pull
up your hardware particulars on the screen faster, and could reduce
the number of stupid questions they ask
Asus mobos - at least one floppy drive, two drive support is rare now.
In some cases, the hardware logic is present for two drives, but
the BIOS doesn't properly support it.
Generally one serial port on the I/O panel. Can be a second port
available as a header on the motherboard.
The Promise 20378 supports up to four drives. Two SATA and two PATA.
You can RAID two PATA drives, but performance will suffer due to
the use of the shared IDE cable. RAIDing a SATA plus a PATA would
be faster. The Promise can also be used in non RAID mode. Note that
it doesn't do ATAPI, so no CD/DVD off the thing.
The Intel ICH5(R) Southbridge supports 6 drives. Four PATA on two
cables, two SATA. When using Win2K/WinXP, all 6 drives can be used.
When using an OS older than that, only four of six drives can be
used. The BIOS has a "Compatible/Enhanced" setting, and the setting
should match the OS about to be booted. In a multi-boot environment,
this can be annoying. The reason there is a four drive limit in
Win98/Winme etc., is that drive emulation is being used, and even if
a drive sits on the SATA cable, the OS thinks it is an old PATA drive.
The emulation is necessary as drivers for SATA might not be available
in an older OS.
For specific answers, I recommend downloading the manuals for the two
boards:
http://www.asus.com.tw/support/download/download.aspx
Enter a partial string for the motherboard name, set the dropdown menu
to "All", and click search. A list of mobos shows up. Click the right
one and all files for the mobo will be listed. Click the name to cause
a download page to open. There are four servers listed, so click the
one nearest you (bandwidth wise). These are the URLs I have bookmarked
for these two boards. I downloaded these quite some time ago, so the
URL may be stale:
http://www.asuscom.de/pub/ASUS/mb/sock478/P4P800-E DX/e1526_p4p800-e_deluxe.pdf
ftp://ftp.asus.com.tw/pub/ASUS/mb/sock478/P4C800E-DX/e1347b_p4c800-e_deluxe.pdf
Things to look for in the manual:
1) The mobo box parts list - what you get in terms of adapters. This
is important, as for example, you might not be getting the adapter
to be able to use the second serial port. Searching on Newegg and
clicking a picture of the product, will also show you what is in
the box.
2) The feature summary tables near the beginning of the manual. It
will give the info on disk drives I listed above. When they say
"a floppy", they mean "one floppy drive" - like lawyers, they use
weasel-words, so interpret what you read accordingly.
3) The BIOS interface - this section is important, because a feature
you require may not be there. For example, virtually all Asus
microATX boards suck when it comes to BIOS - there are almost no
useful settings in the BIOS. Only the P4P800-VM has a decent set
of options, and allows you to set the memory timing. Better to
read the BIOS section now, than to get the board all set up and
go "WTF ?" when you enter the BIOS.
If you are planning on overclocking, you should be aware that there
have been "video artifact" problems when doing 1:1 overclocking
with a 250MHz CPU clock (nominal is 200MHz) on P4P800 type boards.
I think the 5:4 option is supposed to be OK. The P4C800-E is supposed
to be a flawless overclocker, by comparison (overvolters won't be too
pleased, because the board doesn't feature settings high enough to
ignite DIMM modules
. The P4C800-E has been run with a CPU clock
of 300MHz (FSB1200), but you are only likely to do that using a
mobile P4 chip.
Search for "video artifacts" including the double quotes, on the
forums at abxzone.com, for more info on the video problem.
For stock speeds, both boards are good. Supported CPUs are listed here:
http://www.asus.com.tw/support/cpusupport/cpusupport.aspx
Have fun,
Paul
