Asrock P4AL-800 Bios

Ali has been relatively quiet in the retail motherboard market and

you hardly see any vendor using Ali chipsets. The last time we got

our hands on an Ali chipset motherboard was the Iwill XP333 and

that was dated back in February 2002. Ali is still actively

producing chipsets and Ali chipsets survived through the OEM

channel where the price is the primary consideration for many

buyers.

After the first faulty review sample, ASRock kindly sent us another

motherboard for a test drive on their P4AL-800 motherboard.

ASRock has the convention of renaming the chipset to its own name

and the A800N chipset is actually Ali M1683 chip with M1563 Sounth

Bridge. The chipset supports single channel DDR 266/333/400 RAMs up

to a maximum of 4GB of memory. A maximum of three doubled sided

RAMs can be installed and P4AL800 has exactly three dimm slots

onboard. The AGP port meets the AGP V2.0 and 3.0 specifications

with 8X data transfer. The board supports 1.5V AGP card only and

using 3.3V AGP card will cause permanent damage to the

motherboard.

The north bridge and the south bridge are connected via a

Hyper-Transport bus to accommodate the bandwidth demands for

today's applications. The south bridge has direct ATA 133 support

but no serial ATA support.