Taking the three-dollar tour
Before we get much farther in, it's probably best if you see what the board actually looks like, so let's start off with a nice picture of the full board:

The first thing that struck me about the board was its use of color. Sure, I sound like an art critic here, but I'm speaking from a practical standpoint. See the bright red jumper caps sprinkled around the board? Of course you do; they're easy to spot in the photo, so you can imagine how they jump out at you when the board is right in front of you. This is complemented by the fact that all the jumpers are clearly labeled. Have you ever spent five or ten minutes poking around the inside of your case with a flashlight, trying to find the jumper you need? Have you ever concluded that time period by cursing under your breath and beginning a search for the long-lost motherboard manual, because you either can't find the jumper at all, or can't figure out which of the six unlabeled jumpers you need? You won't with this board. Sure, it's just a few bright red jumper caps and some silkscreened lettering, but practically speaking, it's a nice feature.

VIA also used the bright red on the IDE RAID ports, so let's go over that as well. The RAID controller is a Promise PDC20276. This is a "lite" RAID chip of sorts, in that it will do RAID 0 or RAID 1, but not RAID 0+1. Lately it seems companies use either the PDC20276 or Highpoint's HPT372 for their on-board RAID solutions. Both chips offer RAID 0 or RAID 1 and ATA-133 support, but the Highpoint also offers RAID 0+1, which gives it an edge over the Promise. Of course, using RAID 0+1 on a controller with only two channels means running two drives per channel, which is traditionally a no-no, so the lack of RAID 0+1 may not bother enthusiasts interested in RAID anyway.

Now let's move on to another pretty color. Perhaps even more noticeable than the red pieces on the board are the bright yellow ones. One is an audio connector, but ignore that one for now, and look instead at the four blocks of pins mounted in bright yellow plastic. Each of these is a connector for two USB 2.0 ports; add in the two USB 2.0 ports that are mounted below the NIC port on the back of the board, and you wind up with a potential of ten USB 2.0 ports. Yes, there are other boards out there which will support ten USB 2.0 ports, but that doesn't mean that it's not impressive.

Some of the other features manifest themselves on the port cluster of the P4PB Ultra, so a shot of the cluster is in order:

You can see the line in, line out, microphone and game ports for the on-board audio. That audio is provided by a C-Media CMI8738-MX, a chip popular with many manufacturers incorporating audio onto their motherboards, including Soyo in their DRAGON line. The implementation here doesn't seem as robust as Soyo's. For example, the DRAGON boards typically include a backplate with digital inputs and outputs of both the optical and coaxial variety. The P4PB Ultra includes a digital connector backplate, but unfortunately, there is no digital input (though the digital out is both optical and coaxial).

VIA's recent announcement of the Envy24PT chip gives me hope that a future revision of the P4PB Ultra will incorporate that chip with its 24 bit/96KHz audio capabilities. The C-Media solution is passable in some cases, but our sound card round-up revealed that those who really care about audio quality probably won't be satisfied with it. Fortunately for those people, one of those pretty red jumpers I mentioned earlier will disable the on-board audio if you'd like to add a sound card.

You can also see the two USB 2.0 ports I mentioned earlier, as well as an Ethernet port. It provides 10/100 Ethernet courtesy of the VT8235 south bridge. The port cluster rounds things out with the classics: two PS/2 ports, two serial ports and a parallel port.

A couple of other things are worth noting here: First, the P4PB Ultra has a lot of expansion slots—eight in all. There's one AGP slot, six PCI slots, and a CNR slot. However, now that we're talking about expansion slots, I should reveal that the P4PB Ultra breaks a Tech Report taboo: AGP card DIMM clip interference. Because of the placement of the AGP slot relative to the DIMM sockets, one or more of the DIMM clips closest to the AGP slot bump up against the graphics card, and won't open fully. Here's a picture of the P4PB Ultra with a Ti4600 card installed:

This is a common problem with boards that have six PCI slots. Of course, the scope of the problem depends on the size of your video card: the Radeon 9700 Pro interfered only with the DIMM 1 socket, while the Ti4600 obviously managed the hat trick. Still, this interference can make installing or removing RAM a lot more trying than it should be, and nobody wants to have to remove a video card to install or remove memory.

I mentioned before that the P4PB Ultra has a unique combination of features, and now that we've looked at the board in detail, you can see what I was talking about. The thing that strikes me about the board is that it makes no compromises for the on-board inclusions. Some manufacturers might include on-board audio, RAID and Ethernet, but lop off a couple of PCI slots because you probably won't need them so long as you use the on-board components. Others might include a ton of USB ports on the port cluster, but get the real estate for those ports by deleting legacy ports. The P4PB Ultra keeps your options open: You can use the on-board audio, RAID or NIC if you want. But if you want to fill the board with PCI cards instead, you have half a dozen slots at your disposal. If you want plenty of USB ports, you've got them: six physical ports, with headers for four more. But if you also want to plug in your old parallel printer, or use HyperTerminal to connect to a router, you can. Like I said, no compromises.