VIA P4XB -RA 266A mainboard
Opening up the box you’re greeted with a 2-pin front USB connector and the installation manual along with the CD. Nothing special unlike the new bundles SOYO has started shipping out with their products. The board incorporates the standard 1AGP/5PCI and 1CNR configuration.
Personally I would have preferred an extra PCI slot instead of a CNR slot, as hardly anyone uses these slots. Nevertheless it’s a decent setup. Furthermore the board supports up to 3 DDR SDRAM slots, 2 RAID connectors provided by a Promise PDC20265R controller.
On-board audio is provided by a C-Media CMI8738 chip. Contrary to the early days of mainboard audio, at present times the C-Media chip has proved to be as good as or better than the Creative’s SB Live! Besides it’s definitely one of the cheapest 6-channel audio devices you can find.
The P4XB -RA mainboard’s northbridge is covered by an aluminum heatsink, however you might want to attach an active cooling fan to provide more stable conditions.
The AGP slot supports AGP 2X and 4X. There’s ample room around the CPU area for you to attach a good P4 cooling system if you believe in hard-core cooling.
One of the drawbacks with this board is that the memory controller does not support DDR 333, it goes only to DDR 266. I hope future revisions of the board will include support for this. Other than that I didn’t find any fault with the board during the initial outer inspection of the board. So lets take a look at how this board performs in the real world.
Overclocking
Unfortunately the P4XB -RA isn’t the best overclocker out there. The maximum I could overclock this board was 100MHz above the normal speed. So I would hope future revisions of the board will improve upon this to sustain tougher overclocking procedures. However the board includes more or less everything an overclocking enthusiast would look for such as FSB frequencies from 100-199MHz in 1MHz increments, Memory voltage adjustments, and VCore voltage adjustments. As you can see the board includes all the options we normally look for in a good overclocking board, so I sure hope future releases will have better stability in overclocked conditions.
