Conclusion
A product will generally succeed if it fills a gap in the market. Intel's dual-channel boards have, arguably, dominated performance proceedings for a year or so. Intel's gone for the performance segment and missed out on a chipset that offers both excellent raw speed and decent integrated graphics. That's an important point. Not everyone is looking to extract bleeding-edge performance from a particular setup. The emphasis is often on a well-rounded list of components that combine to offer versatility and a greater feature set.This is exactly where ATI's Radeon 9100 IGP is positioned. ATI knows, and our benchmarks show, that the chipset is no Canterwood-beater when looked at from a perspective of pure performance. However, Intel, SiS and VIA, the three major chipset players, have been slow in realising that it's not all about performance. ATI's grafted a reasonable GPU to a Northbridge that also support dual-channel memory and the newer 800MHz CPUs.
Looking at the Radeon 9100 IGP in isolation shows its inadequacies. There's no inherent SATA support, no FireWire400 connectivity, and comparatively poor bandwidth and latency. ASUS has intelligently tried to mask those chipset shortcomings by adding a number of discrete ASICs to boost the feature count. There's little that a motherboard manufacturer can do to raise the stock performance, though. ASUS has concentrated on the parts of the package that it can excel in. As such, the addition of InterVideo's WinDVD Platinum Suite genuinely complements the board's multimedia talents.
Given the street price of ~£75 and the wealth of features on offer from ASUS, the P4R800-V Deluxe is an excellent motherboard if pure performance isn't your primary aim. ASUS and ATI have managed to fill a void that's existed for some time. We just ask that ATI manage to extract better performance from the 9100 IGP chipset. ASUS, in the end, has done a good a job as anyone. Another well-rounded board from the Taiwanese masters. We'll just have to see how Intel strikes back with its next iteration of Pentium 4 motherboards that feature integrated graphics.
