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ASUS P4PE: Board Layout

The ASUS P4PE is laid out pretty nicely, although there were some issues worth noting.

The ATX (20-pin) connector is placed on the preferable side of the P4PE, which greatly aids in clearing out space in the center of a computer case. If the ATX connector was placed a little higher above the DIMM slots, it would have been perfect.

The ATV12V line is placed close to the I/O ports though, which forces you to unhook the ATX12V if you decide you need to uninstall your HSF. Again, this location isn't uncommon, so we're not really too disappointed.

The placement of the Primary and Secondary IDE connectors are good too. Located just above the AGP slot, the Primary and Secondary IDE connectors are placed high enough on the motherboard so that your IDE cables won't be stretching too far in a full ATX-sized case.

There's only one Serial ATA RAID connector (usually there's two), located just below the AGP slot and Primary/Secondary connectors. However, it's been angled 90 degrees in the other direction, towards where your hard drive would normally be. As we noticed with ASUS's A7V8X (KT400) motherboard, this is somewhat odd. The only reason we think ASUS placed the RAID connector this way was to make it easier for a user to maneuver their IDE cables away from the motherboard.

Unfortunately, a layout choice that is becoming more common among motherboards today is the positioning of DIMM connectors very close to the AGP slot. The ASUS P4PE is no different; we were unable to uninstall our memory without having to first uninstall the AGP card. We won't really quibble over this matter too much, but it's an issue nonetheless, as it requires that you first unhook your CRT or LCD cable from your video card, unscrew the video card screw, unhook the AGP lever, take out the video card, install the memory, and then go through the entire process of installing your video card again.