Here’s a golden oldie. Released over 4 years ago this board is still available for those who want to add a new motherboard to a Pentium 4 system.

Old computers can last for a very, very long time and often get disposed of long before their capabilities run out and the components give up the ghost. This board solves one particular problem with very old boards, and that is the lack of upgrade capabilities.

But before we look at those, here’s a list of features:

• Pentium 4 support
• Two port SATA RAID
• 3 x PCI expansion card slots
• 1 x PCIe x16
• 8 x USB
• Onboard audio
• LAN port

I can honestly admit that I still run a Pentium 4 processor on my primary (and only) computer. It has been in service for 7 years. And still going strong.

I upgraded primarily to take advantage of SATA RAID. After my hard drive crashed and I lost all my data I realized that I needed some sort of RAID solution for safety’s sake. The upgraded motherboard had this as a built-in feature.

For an older P4 system this motherboard will allow the addition of a RAID setup and upgrade to a decent graphics card. The built-in features like audio and LAN can be some nice added extras too.

The pricing is not too low, but this product has been through the paces and come out a winner. With years of proven performance behind it, it’s guaranteed to work well.

• Intel Core2 Extreme, Quad and Duo support
• 1333/1066/800 MHz FSB
• No integrated graphics
• Up to 8 GB of dual-channel DDR3 DIMMs (4 x 2 GB)
• HD audio
• Gigabit Ethernet support
• Up to 12 USB 2.0 ports
• Three PCIe x16
• Two firewire
• Six SATA ports with RAID

Even though this board is aimed at gamers, and by offering three PCIe x16 ports, it certainly caters to them, but the rest of the features offer almost everything you could need to start a computer. There is plenty of room for memory expansion, up to 8 GB, which is great for new games, but is also more than enough for any office application you’d like to throw at it. Up to four sticks are supported, but I hardly imagine that anything over a total of 4 GB would be necessary. HD audio, although common to many boards, is always a good extra, and with the quality offered, along with 7.1 channel audio and the ability to listen to two separate audio channels you’ll be able to listen to music and chat to your friends online at the same time. Gigabit Ethernet has not yet taken complete hold, but in looking forward it will certainly give a good amount of future-proofness, and allow very high speeds over networks that support it. Storage is handled by IDE and SATA. The standard two IDE ports are there, holding up the fort from times gone by, although I suspect they will be on their way out sometime soon, much like the ubiquitous serial ports and parallel port that are missing from this motherboard. The eSATA ports are certainly more useful than serial and parallel ports, which continue to be useful only in industry where dedicated machines have been running on them for decades. Six SATA ports with RAID will allow a combination of striped storage or mirrored storage, according to your needs. I love motherboards with lots of features and my only gripe with this one is the lack of onboard graphics. That said, I’d just invest in a cheap one considering all the features of the board itself. Although quite expensive, you get more than you need for any application, it has all the necessary features and more. I would recommend it for anyone considering the jump into the Core2 range.

The AM2 socket has 940 pins, but should not be confused with the 940 pin chips that AMD had a little while back, these have a different setup for the pins under the processor itself.

Besides the obvious support of AM2 processors, this board has quiet a few other features. It can suppot up to 8GB or DDR2 RAM. There are 2 PCIe slots, but they only work at 8x, meaning they are slightly slower than cards running on the more expensive chipset. The usual floppy drive connectors and hard drive connectors are in place, but there are also two sets of 3 SATA connectors.

High Definition Audio is the new standard in onboard audio and allows for much better quality from sound cards that are built into the motherboard.

In the full test at motherboards.org, they found the board to be a little slower that the ASUS board that they had for comparisson. The board itself is aimed at the mid-range. The nForce 570 SLI chipset is not as high-performance as its 590 counterpart, which is aimed at the enthusiast.

Check out the full article here.