I'm not a fan of having device
connectors to the left of the CPU socket. The ports there are, the more cables
have to run in front of the CPU fan which obstructs airflow. Well there are a
total of six connectors to the right of the CPU Socket it may
get real busy in front of the processor!
The Main
ATX power connector is also too close to the
CPU retention mechanism so it's very difficult to remove the power supply cable once
it's plugged in.
You probably noticed that P4ES
only has two DIMM slots, but since the i845 chipset can only address a maximum
of four banks
and since almost all the DDR you buy out there is double
sided, having a third DIMM slot would actually be useless.
FI (Fantastic Interface)
Panel:
Since the P4ES supports so many different forms of
portable media (compact flash, secure digital and memory stick) Iwill has
decided to make things easy on the user and they created the FI Panel. The FI
panel also has headphone and MIC jacks as well as two USB ports. The secure
digital and memory stick both communicate to the computer via the USB ports, but
we were surprised to see that the compact flash uses an IDE interface! After a
bit of thinking, it donned on me that the compact flash port is also compatible
with the very large micro drives.
Iwill's
first attempt at a multi function I/O front mounted panel is a good one, but it's not exactly
the prettiest thing to look at. Unless you have a need to use the media
ports, I can't really see anyone installing this thing onto their computer (it's useful, just
not that great to look at).
As with the Iwill P4GS, the P4ES is a value oriented
motherboard and does not support many overclocking options. The P4ES auto
detects your CPU to see if it's a 400 MHz or 533 MHz; if it detects that your
chip is a 400 MHz version you'll be limited to a maximum of 132 MHz FSB.
Since the test processor we used in this review is a 1.6A, we couldn't go
above 132 MHz FSB in our tests.
RSS Newsletter
