The first P4 Combo board is born and it comes from ASrock. This board has proven itself to be very reliable in our tests. Initially, we were quite skeptical about its performance and stability as my friends and I had bad experiences with such designs from another manufacturer.

Based on the i848P single channel chipset, this Combo board supports both the Socket 478 and 775 CPU types. This makes it a flexible solution for users who wishes to use P4 S478 and upgrade to 775 Prescott when the price is more affordable. It also uses the AGP slot which has abundant VGA cards available in the market compared to the scarce PCI-E cards.

The board's performance is comparable to 848P boards available but it is slightly slower if you were to compare to those based on dual channel chipsets e.g. 865PE chipsets. This is especially true in the graphics benchmarks that benefits with more memory bandwidth

On the overclocking department, this board has no voltage adjustments but comes with a nice FSB range of up to 300MHz. From what I understand, ASrock claims that the FIX and AGP is fixed at 33/66 irregardless of the FSB. I am unable to verify that as I don't have the device to check it. From my overclocking experience, it seems fine as I ran the P4 2.4c all the way to 266MHz x 12 without any issues running ASYNC 5:4 mode. The Prescott is harder to overclock and we only managed up to 210MHz which is 3.6-> 3.8GHz.

This board supports up to 8 USB 2.0 ports which 6 is already built onto the board's back panel.  It also comes with CMedia 5.1 channel audio chipset which should be sufficient for most users. The only thing I hate is the installation of the jumpers when switching from 478 to 775. There are simply too many jumpers to remove and insert making installation very frustrating even though ASrock provided a kit to extract the jumpers.

We see a multilingual manual provided in the package which is useful for most international users as it is written in major languages used worldwide.

Overall, it is an innovative product and that wins our Award.

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Pros

• Dual Socket type (Upgradeable)
• 8 X USB 2.0 
• Ethernet
• SATA

Cons

• No IDE RAID
• No Voltage selections
• Too many jumpers for switching 478<->775

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.

Product Innovation Award