The Bundle, presentation and features
More and more emphasis is being placed on to packaging and the associated bundle.
The P4PB-UR is rather a muted affair with its matt finish and understated graphics, certainly not one of the more vibrant presentations that I've become accustomed to recently.
The sticker on the bottom right of the front cover quite clearly spells out what's on offer with this motherboard. A reasonably comprehensive list with some value-adding extras included. This seems to be the way of things in the past few months, motherboards armed to the teeth with extras.
Inside we have the motherboard accompanied by two manuals, one of which is a quickstart guide in numerous languages and a more thorough main manual. Whilst not being up to the standard of the very best that I have read, the main manual clearly spells out what a novice would need to know to get the motherboard operational.
You are given 1 ATA133 IDE cable, 1 ATA33 cable and 1 floppy cable. I've previously bemoaned the fact that other manufacturers only give you one IDE cable as standard, so it is pleasing to see two. You can connect the usual 3 IDE devices located in most peoples' systems immediately.
This particular P4X333 doesn't have the newer 8235 Southbridge, instead with have the incumbent 8233A Southbridge. I'll talk about this later but one main difference is that the former natively supports USB2.0 (much like the Intel 845E) and the latter needs an on-board chip for USB2.0 duties, That is how the supplied 4-port USB2.0 cable is used. A backplane is naturally included. A driver CD with the usual chipset drivers, along with USB 2.0 and VIA's in-house utilities and hardware monitoring software was included, too.
Whilst not being quite at the top of our bundle and presentation list, the P4X333 is reasonable on this front, helped by the decent manuals and full complement of IDE leads.
