The Serpent Rider wrote on 2023-06-18, 12:14:

Tetrium wrote on 2023-06-17, 21:50:

Not sure in how much the USB ports behind the i/o shields are affected btw.

AFAIK the main culprit is front IO port(s). ATX IO is shielded better.

It may not be enough. A USB card will still be a better option considering you could kill an otherwise perfectly good mobo just by touching it 0.o

I didn’t even have the USB front header connected at all when mine died

Zeerex wrote on 2023-06-18, 21:19:

I didn’t even have the USB front header connected at all when mine died

Fairly sure it doesn't matter. Anything USB goes through the SB, be it front or back.

I will add my experience, as I have 5 P4P800 types of board.
Unfortunately, 3 are already dead.

First one, P4P800-X had little hole in southbridge. I was unexperienced at that time, and didn't know P4P800 had often issues. Otherwise, I would see it and didn't buy it. It was sold untested. After pluggin it in and run, the smoke came out of southbridge of that hole. Ended up in pile for spare part

Second one was luck. It was P4P800 first revision. It was without NB heatsink, retention bracket, all jumpers, and had like 8 buldged caps. But it was for 10 cents + shipping, with lots of other hardware, for basicaly for 50 cents with shipping. So I've risked it.
After filling jumpers, putting NB heatsink, it ran. I couldn't believe. It was completly stable even with buldged caps. I've put it with pile to friend, that know solder and change capacitors. I've donated him dead P4P800-X, and moved heatsink and stuff. Unfortunately, it returned dead. 🙁 He changed capacitors on like 15 boards, 14 of them run , perfect job, this one, dont even start. Well, PSU run for a microsecond, then shut down. I suspect micro-solder that make short. He probably somewhere made mistake, or drop of molten tin drop somewhere.

Third one is P4P800-VM. It was functional, it is going strong to this day, but wasnt run too much, only like for 1 hour. But it has no tweaking in BIOS, which very much disapointed me. Not even basic FSB changing. It is basically on par with Intel desktop board like D865PESO.

Forth one is P4P800SE. Bought it "functional". Came dead. Seller didn't admit me even small compensation, stating "it's old hardware, you need to count with that. Happened to me lots of time". That's it. CPU staying cold after plugging power in.

Fifth one is the only one "big" that survived. P4P800-X, bought it tested, came working, had it 1 hour ran for testing... stable. The only thing that works weird is USB boot (Hirens) normally, board boot within 10 seconds, but this one took always about 3 minutes. Trying everything with USB in BIOS, including turning on / off USB 2.0, but result still the same.

I bought also P4P800s-X, but it's not 865PE, but 848P, not sure, if it can be count for P4P800 series. Came death, black screen, also bought untested.

This board really died a lot, it can be seen on historical threads in tech forums, and also, pretty much dies easily, after transporting, or storing, and when you take it untested, it have high chance of be dead, or not survive the transport.
So my experience only admits , this board is problematic.

Until it stop working, it works flawlesly, and good, it won lots of roundsup, and was marked as one of the best socket 478 boards, and maybe the best 865PE board. But... these problems were revealed after longterm use (so not in the reviews).

I also have two dead p4p800 (different modification, serial numbers start from 42 and 47). The mainboards had faulty ICH5.
I remember how I burned two s478 mainboards (based on ICH4 and ICH5) at work. I just put USB stick into USB port and the PC just hung on and wouldn't start anymore.
The rear USB ports are shielded by metal IO-shield backplate, so there's a big chance that before insertion of USB device you touch IO-shield and your static electricity flows to the ground.

Friends did have one.
Only board I know that BIOS just go corrupt like that for fun. Fortunately it can be fixed..