Layout and features
The motherboard looks busy on first appearance. A number of red-topped jumpers sit on the board. In these days of jumper-free design, this seems to be something of a throwback to motherboards of a couple of years ago. The CPU socket is rotated from the standard position. The extra room afforded gives way to a bank of capacitors. I found it relatively difficult to mount an Alpha-class of cooler in the confined space, especially with the CPU fan header in such close proximity. The 4-pin P4 power connector is somewhat hidden in the corner.
Housing up to 3GB of RAM, the 3 DDR slots cannot be used easily if a larger AGP card is inserted (Ti 4400/4600, for example). The floppy port is extremely close to a capacitor, so much so that using a cable with clips is almost impossible. The main ATX power cable is a little further down the board than is normal, although this should pose no real problems. The capacitor to the left of the DDR slots came dangerously close to stopping the installation of an MSI GeForce4 Ti4200 - it could have been placed in a better position. The various media card connections attach to the panel from connectors located just to the left of the IDE ports.
IDE RAID is provided by the ATA133 compatible Promise PDC20276 controller. It's toggled on/off via the jumper located next to it. It offers RAID0 and RAID1, but not RAID 0+1. Single drives can be attached but need to be configured in a pseudo RAID to work correctly. I prefer the Highpoint variety of RAID. The four yellow headers situated in that general area each offer 2 USB2.0 ports each. With two running off the backplane we have a total of 10 on offer - six from the VIA VT8235 SB and another four via the VIA6202 IC. It seems a shame, then, that no Firewire support is present here. I'd have sacrificed the extra USB ports in favour of the other high-speed format.
CMI's excellent 8738 CODEC is fully exploited by the add-on S/PDIF bracket (both optical and RCA out) connecting on the right. If you want a digital-to-digital audio connection, the P4B Ultra is well-specified to meet your requirements.
A largely standard backplane here, with only the 10/100 LAN port being irregular. The blue and red jacks double-up as rear (L/R) and centre/sub outputs in 6-channel sound mode. The layout of the board could have been a little neater, but it's generally good.
