Choosing a P4 motherboard

Discussion in 'CPU, Motherboards and Memory' started by loaded_chambers, Apr 13, 2003.

  1. loaded_chambers

    loaded_chambers Geek Trainee

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    I'm not satisfied with my Soyo P4PX400 dragon lite mobo and am looking for a more stable, solid one to replace it. Can anyone give me some suggestions so I can start shopping? I need a mobo that supports Socket 478-DDR400-AGP8X(Not too important)-3.06 CPU-ATA 133 transfer rate or raid. Preferably under $150-160. No more Gigabytes and Soyo's for me. Thanks!
     
  2. Big B

    Big B HWF Godfather

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    Since you've got a Hyper Threading capable CPU, look at a motherboard featuring the following Intel chipsets: E7505 (Granite Bay), 845PE, or the 850E. SiS has some chipsets out, but the savings isn't as great so I've heard.

    The Granite Bay boards run at least $200 for the most basic boards, but they offer the newest features like AGP 8x---although this isn't really useful at this point in time. It gets it's speed from dual-channel DDR memory. You'd have to have 2 sticks of equal size, as well, but it's currently the top performer.
    The 845PE supports single channel DDR, and is the only 845x chipset with the Hyperthreading support you'd like to have for that 3.06 P4. It's also the cheapest solution. Boards can easily be found in the $80 range.
    The 850E supports RDRAM, so that would require purchasing new RAM. However, it's about neck-in-neck with the Granite Bay chipset. Unfortunately RDRAM is still the priciest memory out there.
    To get DDR 400 support, you'll have to wait for Granite Bay's successor, Canterwood to make native use out of the DDR 400 ram you have. If you want it now, you'll need to overclock to get it.

    Right now, I've been pretty happy with Abit. They have 3 boards with the 845PE chipset: the BH7, BE7 (-RAID), and the IT7-Max2 version 2.0. The boards run from around $90-about 150 going up in price as the order they're listed. The BE7 and IT7 boards use a Highpoint RAID controller with native RAID and JBOD support if you don't run RAID like me. The IT7 also features 2 serial ATA ports and a SATA adapter. The BH7 has SATA only. I'm not up on my SATA yet, and I'm not sure if the board includes an SATA adapter.
    Keep in mind that if you get a board with SATA included, Abit seems to be the only one including an SATA adapter right now.

    Other brands that suit my fancy are AOpen, Asus, MSI, Tyan, SuperMicro and Iwill. These companies have boards that should fit most of what you need.
     

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