1.3Special features

1.3.1 Product highlights

Latest processor technology

The P4B266-E motherboard supports the latest Intel Pentium 4 478/ Northwood Processor, also known as P4, via a 478-pin surface mount ZIF socket. The Pentium 4 processor utilizes the advanced 0.18 micron processor core in FC-PGA2 package for a 2.0GHz frequency, while the Northwood processor uses the 0.13 micron processor core with 512KB L2 cache for up to a speedy 2.4+GHz frequency. The P4 offers optimized performance for audio, video, and Internet applications. See page 2-4.

DDR memory support

Employing the Double Data Rate (DDR) memory technology, the P4B266- E motherboard supports up to 2GB of system memory using PC2100/1600 DDR DIMMs. The ultra-fast 266MHz memory bus doubles the speed of the PC133 SDRAM to deliver the required bandwidth for the latest 3D graphics, multimedia, and Internet applications. See page 2-10.

RAID 0/RAID 1 support (optional)

The motherboard includes the Promise® chip PDC20276 and two ATAIDE interfaces to support Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) configuration. This feature supports Ultra ATA/133 drives, and is backward compatible with Ultra ATA/100/66/33 drives. The RAID controller onboard supports RAID 0 and RAID 1 configurations.

RAID 0 (called data striping) optimizes two identical hard disk drives to read and write data in parallel, interleaved stacks. Two hard disks perform the same work as a single drive but at a sustained data transfer rate, double that of a single disk alone, thus improving data access and storage. RAID 1 (called data mirroring) copies and maintains an identical image of data from one drive to a second drive. If one drive fails, the disk array management software directs all applications to the surviving drive as it contains a complete copy of the data in the other drive. This RAID configuration provides data protection and increases fault tolerance to the entire system. Refer to section “5.4 RAID 0/RAID 1 configurations” on page 5-18 for more information.

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Chapter 1: Product introduction