VIA VPSD P4B-UR P4X333 Motherboard

Conclusion

That fact that there are two different P4X333s floating around complicates the matter somewhat. The newer P4X333 sports the enhanced 8235 Southbridge and even an enhanced Northbridge. This was the one that I was really looking forward to.

The VIA P4B-UR simply updates the existing P4X266A motherboard to offer direct support for PC2700 and even PC3200 memory, this is no bad thing, however.

The troubling aspect for me was the inability to run at 133FSB with my 1.6GHz processor, one that runs at 155FSB at default voltage on other motherboards. No matter what settings I tried, I simply couldn't get it past the initial BIOS screen, it would simply freeze. Restoring the FSB to below 128 allowed successful booting into Windows XP.

The overall packaging was good, and the motherboard itself was reasonably well featured with decent on-board sound, IDE RAID, albeit a light version, and USB2.0 as standard. The colour of the PCB was a departure from the norm, reminiscent of Gigabyte's recent offerings. The BIOS was solid and reasonably tweakable, too.

The performance with the PC2700 memory option selected was excellent, directly on a par with, if not exceeding the benchmarks laid down by the MSI SiS645DX motherboard (also PC2700-capable). It topped my comparative 'board benchmarks more often than not, attesting to the quality of the memory controller present.

Can I recommend this motherboard wholeheartedly ?, probably not. It's a good motherboard but there are a number of excellent motherboards from other manufacturers that will probably tempt your wallet first. The very fact that I, an experienced PC user, was unable to run at 133FSB, wouldn't inspire most novices with confidence on the overclocking front.

If, however, you're looking for a featured and stable motherboard, you might want to give the P4B-UR some thought.

Highs