Features continued
I've been browsing VIA's VPSD motherboard pages recently and found that one P4X333 is specified with the newer, revised VT8235 Southbridge, one that natively supports USB2.0 and a 533MB/s V-Link to the VT8754A 8x AGP compatible Northbridge. On this particular P4X333, we have the older VT8233A SB and presumably a different variant of the VT8754 NB. Considering that the V-MAP architecture means that replacement bridges are pin-for-pin compatible, this would have been easy for VIA to implement.
I was disappointed that the 8235 SB was not present as I was looking forward to benchmarking the improved memory controller. Having said that, this motherboard does have up to DDR400 memory support, more on this later.
RAID is provided by the popular Promise PDC20276 chipset. The downside to the particular one on offer is that it is identified as the MBFastTrack Lite 133. Although it supports up to four hard drives, only two can be used in either RAID 0 or RAID 1 modes. Therefore, it supports RAID 0, RAID 1 but not RAID 0+1. You cannot change the stripe size, either. I much prefer the Highpoint variety of controller.
Also pictured above is the additional USB2.0 controller. This is present as we still have the older VT8233A SB. It supports 4-USB2.0 ports via the supplied USB2.0 bracket, thereby giving a total of 6-USB ports (2 USB1.1 and 4 USB2.0).
We have 5-PCI slots as standard and a rather redundant CNR slot. The 6th PCI slot is silkscreened for some strange reason.
The right-hand-side contains premium on-board sound via the capable 6-channel CMI 8738 CODEC. Whilst my review sample was not supplied with relevant output bracket, I am assured that this will be the case on shipping models. To the right we have CD, Aux and Modem inputs and above that a rather strange jumper. It's used to enable / disable on-board sound, this cannot be done in BIOS.
The backplane is entirely regular due to the lack of on-board LAN. We have the standard inputs here.
Overall, the features list is pretty good. Excellent on-board sound, RAID, albeit a slightly under-specified version, USB2.0 and 3 DIMM slots ensure that the P4PB-UR definitely classes itself as a premium motherboard.
