Conclusion
Performance first and I have to admit I was surprised. In apps that are memory bound, the 655TX appears to be faster than Canterwood. The Springdale-PE on the DFI, backed up by a capable PAT BIOS means that we were emulating Canterwood. It has lower memory access latency, measured by Sciencemark, and it appears to have a touch more available bandwidth too. It's not much, but it's enough. With Canterwood the performance champion for P4, it appears we have a new champion when your app is memory bound in any way. Raw CPU performance is identical; 655TX ran the 3.2GHz Northwood without issue.AGP related performance is fractionally lower, but I mean it when I say fractionally, you'd be hard pressed to tell in the real world, if at all. So competitive performance there too. A performance surprise all round, I can't fault the ASUS in that respect.
In terms of features, the ASUS implementation is in the same ballpark as their Canterwood and Springdale P4 products. Gigabit Ethernet networking, FireWire, lots of USB, IDE and SATA RAID (although not too many IDE devices supported) see to that. The bundle is functional rather than over the top; I'd have liked to have seen a couple more SATA data cables to support more than 2 of the ports and the WiFi card would have been nice. The price for its inclusion in the new A7N8X-E nForce2 product is low, under < £10, but I don't think there's a box bundle for the P4S800D-E that features it, the bundle reviewed today being the full featured one.
The layout has no obvious problems, everything is well placed and the silent cooling solution on the northbridge is always good to see.
I was able to do some limited overclocking testing with the board and 12 x 250 passed all tests without a hitch. But without some more time to spend with it, I can't verify if it's a monster front side bus overclocker like Canterwood and Springdale products can be. Hopefully we'll get the board back at some point for more testing in that regard.
Last on our list of considerations is therefore price. £70 without VAT (£82.25 with) is the set price from ASUS UK. At that price, it's hard to recommend much else. Sure you can find more feature packed boards but as far as affordable P4 performance goes, be sure to give the ASUS a look. It's faster than the i865PE+PAT combo in the vast majority of our subsystem tests, you can't ignore that.
I'm more than pleasantly surprised by the P4S800D-E Deluxe, infact I'm positively enthusiastic about its price/performance showing. I'm happy to recommend it and be sure to put it on your shortlist. My review tagline was "Fast P4 without the cost?". Absolutely, snap them up and to hell with the non-Intel stigma. A great product from SiS, ASUS wrap it up very well.
Highly recommended, it shows up in mass quantity very soon.
Score
Pros
Excellent, Canterwood-beating performanceWiFi slot
Good features, 4 SATA, 6 USB2.0, 2 FireWire and S/PDIF for £82 is excellent
Good presentation
Good BIOS and enthusiast tweaking options
Flexible memory controller
Flexible disk setups possible
Very cheap
Solid layout
Prescott support
Cons
Unproven big FSB overclocking (but my fault for not giving that a proper whirl)Precious little else
