Here's a funny thing. Asus has brought out a new Pentium 4 motherboard that doesn't have dual channel memory support, yet despite that apparently fatal flaw, the P4P800S-E Wireless Edition is absolutely superb.

The key to this motherboard - as ever - is the chipset. Intel has updated its 845PE and released it as the 848P. That means it supports all the latest Pentium 4 processors and also has the ICH5/ICH5R Southbridge with native support for Serial ATA hard drives.

In the case of this Asus we get the ICH5R which has support for Raid 0 or Raid 1, but of course you'll need a pair of Serial ATA drives if you want to use Raid. In fact the only difference that we can find between the 848P and the Springdale 865PE is that 848P 'only' supports 2GB of memory, rather than the 4GB of 865PE, and the memory operates in single channel mode, rather than dual channel. This impacts performance to the tune of three or four percent, but it's really not a big deal.

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On the other hand, it is quite clear from off-the-record comments by the industry that 848P is significantly cheaper than 865PE, so you should find the Asus P4P800S-E Wireless Edition on sale for £100 including VAT. That's very fair value for a quality motherboard that has a decent features list.

In the main this is a very conventional motherboard with three memory slots up top, next to the two IDE connectors, the floppy connector and the main power connector. The small ATX 12V connector has plenty of room near the Northbridge, which is passively cooled.

Down by the bare Southbridge you'll find the two Serial ATA connectors and connectors for the two brackets which respectively carry two USB 2.0 ports and a single Firewire, although we fail to see why all three ports wouldn't fit on a single bracket. As you would expect with a full-sized ATX board, you get five PCI slots in addition to the AGP 8x slot with its sliding retention device.

We doubt you'll need all five PCI slots as there are plenty of ports and connectors on the backplate. In addition to the usual legacy ports there are four USB 2.0, one Firewire, mini jacks for the integrated audio (and also a coaxial SPDIF output), plus Intel Gigabit LAN.

This latter uses a neat feature that we first saw in the 865PE chipset, called CSA (Connection Streaming Architecture). The conventional method is to connect the LAN to the Southbridge where it could potentially use all the available data bandwidth, which in turn might starve the hard drives of data. With CSA the LAN connects more directly with the Northbridge to get as close as possible to the processor and memory.

You'll note that so far we've glossed over the 'Wireless Edition' part of the model name, but that's because we've been saving the best 'til last. Below the fifth PCI slot is a header that is a similar size to an AMR or ACR slot. This header accepts the Asus WiFi@home module, which is a riser card that supports 802.11b, a.k.a. Wi-Fi.

Asus supplies an external aerial that you can position to maximise the Wi-Fi signal. Asus also supplies software that allows your PC to act as a Wi-Fi access point so you could either connect a wireless notebook directly to your PC, or via the PC into a home or office LAN. Clearly the PC needs to be turned on to get the connection, but this could be a quick, simple and cheap way to extend a network for occasional wireless use.

We expect to see Intel introduce a similar technology with its Grantsdale chipset for Prescott Pentium 4 in the middle of 2004, when the ICH6 Southbridge is introduced.

At its heart the Asus P4P800S-E is a decent Pentium 4 motherboard that balances features, performance and price very successfully. If you push the boat out and choose the Wireless Edition model you get some incredibly neat features, all for a very reasonable price.