Reccomended P4 Boards

malcontent

malcontent

1
Since I accidently fried a DDR Module amd made a mess of one of the DDR slots, I decided that it might be tme for an update. I have been reasonably happy with my current Athlon XP1900+ rig but I utterly despise the heatsink retention clip and have decided to defect to Intel.

Does anyone have any suggestions for some good, reliable boards?
 
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LTR12101B

1
Not sure what there is to dislike about the AMD Heatsink clip ... no worse than socket 7.
It varies as well, some heatsinks only use one point on each side, while others (larger, heavier) use all 3 points on each side - and the really big monsters are sometimes bolt-through.

This article is an interesting take on Intel vs AMD
http://www.rojakpot.com/default.aspx?location=3&var1=66&var2=0

Looks like AMD shaves it on cost, but needs a better heatsink to overclock.
But they really rate the Intel 2.4C with motherboard and RAM capable of pushing to 275MHz - the normal "800" is 200 quad-pumped - that's dual DDR INTERLEAVED, not just feeding into the chipset and waiting like in Nforce2!

AMD K7 Motherboards also tend to be cheaper, so the AMD is probably still the CPU of choice for budget systems.

AMD64 has a hard task though - to replace the previous range, will need a cheap version (I guess they could Duron-ize it) but also economical motherboards - even better if they had DX9 onboard graphics.

While to displace Intel, it needs performance/price again - only more of it.
 
weboneando

weboneando

1
875p from Intel is the top of the line right now, the 865 is also a very good choice by the moment VIA and SIS are far from succed with performance in relation to the Intel chipsets (not the case when the 810 was in the market), anyway that is my opinion based in my experience.

If your budget is not a factor then look at the P4C800-Deluxe from Asus, it´s a big monster.
 
weboneando

weboneando

1
Of course, you can use four parallel ATA devices attached to the traditional ide controller plus 2 SATA drives attached to the controller integrated in the chipset and 2 more SATA drives attached to the Promise controller wich can be set to just IDE controller or RAID, and you can boot from any device you want, the only thing is that if you want your os to boot from a drive attached to the Promise you´ll need to add the drivers but that´s it.
 
malcontent

malcontent

1
Many drives? Me likes the sound of that :D I can have a drive for permanant Operating Systems, a drive for temp/experimenting Operating Systems, A drive for storing my vast amounts of shite/porn/music/movies/VMware Virtual machines and all any other kind of storage/CD drive I can think of (sounds like a good PSU is needed, maybe 520W?)
 
weboneando

weboneando

1
I have 5 hds and 2 burners plus 2 cd drives all running with a 450w psu, never had a problem.

To run several OS´s or various installs of the same what I do is dettach every drive but the one in wich the install is going to be do the install and then reattach the drives this way each os is installed in each single drive without messing with boot sectors of the others, and now with bios ver 1014 of the P4C800 you can see and choose from every single boot device in the boot selector screen just by pressing F8 a very nice feature added to the BIOS program.
 
malcontent

malcontent

1
The way I set up my current multiboot was to:

1) Create a small partition and install Windows 98 (as a rescue OS)
2) Create a reasonable size partition and install 2000
3) Same for XP
4) Create a partition for storing Windows Files

5) Create and ext3 partition for Red Hat 9
6) Create a partition for SuSE
7) Create a ReiserFS partition for Linux files which is mounted as a stuff directory in my home dir (~) under the linuxes

Not the most efficient way to use HD real estate but what can I say, 120GB sent me mad with power (oh yeah, and a 500mb swap drive which I am soon to ditch)

And of course there is the neon light (since I started using it, the computer became unstable but the PSU was 300W running a neon light, 2 CDs and 2 HDs)
 
weboneando

weboneando

1
The way I use my drives is like this:

1) one drive has the XP that my wife uses so we don´t have to deal with individual settings and users inside the same os.
2) another drive has XP that I use for editing apps like Cubase and Premiere
3) a 3rd drive has XP wich I use for all the games and to test stuff this is the one that it doesn´t matter if the system goes down.
4) a RAID 1 with 2 120gb drives wich is used to capture video and sometimes audio.

I use the installment metod described before because that way if any of the OS´s goes down the others are still able to run with no problem at all because they are completely independent with no compromise in the boot sector in between them, that way if I screw up with any system my wife would still be able to use the pc and I won´t have to suffer any injury. :D
 
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Mr Snatcher

New member
Asus are good boards, but do some research.

Abit IC-7 Max 3 will blow away anything Asus puts out.
Soyo SY-P4I875P DRAGON 2 (Platinum Edition) board is also very good, and looks cool also. weboneando is correct about the i875p chipset to be the best, which the boards above have. They are a little pricey, but you get what you pay for.

The one thing I dont like about Asus is, they dont include a sata floppy to install sata drives. There on the cd. So you need 2 pc's to load windows on a sata drive.
 
weboneando

weboneando

1
Mr Snatcher said:
The one thing I dont like about Asus is, they dont include a sata floppy to install sata drives. There on the cd. So you need 2 pc's to load windows on a sata drive.
Click to expand...
This is only a problem if you´re planning to use a RAID setup to install your OS, if you use the SATA channels from the chipset then there is no need for drivers during the install.

Besides floppy is dead for me from a long time, what should be improved is the process by wich you add additional drivers during the install.
 
M

Mr Snatcher

New member
I had issues with the Asus K8V deluxe and a couple of there other boards, trying to install Xp on a sata drive was horrible. I had no problems with Abit boards. But once you get them going there great. I also realized the K8V had a bios problem, but heard they fixed that. They also havent had a problem yet, unlike some other boards like pc chips and ecs.

The floppy is also dead issue with me, dell charges extra for those now. :p
 
malcontent

malcontent

1
Eventually, I ordered the Asus P4C800 Deluxe m'board, a P4 2.4 GHz (both with the 800 MHz bus), 512 mb of Crucial RAM in 256mb modules (Would have gotten Kingston/Corsair but my bank account looked a little low), a super flower 520W PSU with 4 fans (I think my 300W was misbehaving and the whole thing may have been underpowered so I'm taking no chances/prisoners)

And to top it off, an XFX Geforce Fx5200 AGP8x 256MB DDR DVI TV-Out to replace my ageing Geforce 2 GTS with a pitifull 32mb (that'll be nice when HL2 is released)


The bits should arrive tommorow hopefullt (23rd) so wish me luck for when I set the whole thing up (I can't believe I put the DDR in wrong way round, nearly shat myself when I saw the sparks and the smoke :( )
 
weboneando

weboneando

1
malcontent said:
And to top it off, an XFX Geforce Fx5200 AGP8x 256MB DDR DVI TV-Out to replace my ageing Geforce 2 GTS with a pitifull 32mb (that'll be nice when HL2 is released)
Click to expand...
I don´t like to be the carrier of bad news but saddly for Nvidia followers like me there´s been reports that Nvidia cards won´t behave as good as ATI cards in HL2, rumors say that maybe this could be fixed in future releases of drivers but by the time ATI cards are the way to be if you want to be in the game (altough that wont make me change my Nvidia for an ATI) :D
 
malcontent

malcontent

1
I use linux quite often, I've heard that Nvidia has a Linux driver but obviously I've never used it before whereas I have used the Nvidia driver, may as well stick with what I know.
 
S

scarecrow

1
malcontent said:
I've heard that Nvidia has a Linux driver but obviously I've never used it before...
Click to expand...
Well done. Unless you play a lot of OpenGL games under Linux, you are well advised NOT installing the Nvidia 3D-enabled driver. After installing it, compiling pretty mainstream/easy programs from sourcecode can be a real nightmare...
 
malcontent

malcontent

1
oops, slight error

I use linux quite often, I've heard that Nvidia has a Linux driver but obviously I've never used it before whereas I have used the Nvidia driver, may as well stick with what I know.

Obviously I put Nvidia twice (not enough caffiene in my system at the time), this is how it should read

I use linux quite often, I've heard that ATI has a Linux driver but obviously I've never used it before whereas I have used the Nvidia driver, may as well stick with what I know.

I've never used the ATI Linux driver but I do use the Nvidia accelerated driver, I don't know about the source code problems but then again, I don't do much compiling anyway. I need to run the 3d driver since I often use the UT3 demo and my copy of uplink (which I've found runs much better under Linux with Windowmaker rather than Windows 2000/XP)
 
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