Need Help: Suggestions for Best p4 board today???

[Newf !!!]

I'm a computer Tech. Built many machines over the last 20 years. But, the last 2 years I do mostly server work and networking.

So, I'm out of touch with motherboards, chipsets, and such.

I generally stick to Abit or ASus boards for my home machines. Machines will be used for a lot of things, but i build my machines as gaming machines in mind for speed.

Looking for suggestion for the BEST Intel P4 board right now

1.I do not want an Athlon, please do not say you know what...
2. Don't care about Raid ( although I will probaby get it for future use)
3. I have a lot of EIDE drives still, so EIDE with Serial ATA would be cool
4. I want speed, and stability as well as ( most important ) future upgradeability. I want a board that is capable of taking a much faster chip then is out today.
5. I don't overclock a lot, but I find that a good overclocking board is great for future upgrading. For example: If I can overclock a chip ( in theory) to 4 gig now, then once the 4 gigs are out I should be able to use them.

6. do NOT care for onboard anything....aka video/sound. Except LAN which is just useful, but the rest I will be using my own cards

7. Must take the fastest ram today
8. ability to take more then 4 drives would be nice

It's been a long time since I upgraded my personal machine. Lets put it this way. The last board I bought for myself was an Abit 440BX BE6-II. I love this board. LAsted forever, started with a Celeron 300 oc'd. Then later stuck in a P3 1.0gig when they were cheap. 8 hard drives and stable as can be ( once you figure it out ) that's now my home server, and if I could find today's version of that board, I'd be so happy.

 

[Chris Patten]

The problem with finding a motherboard that has all of the features you want is the future upgradeability. With Intel announcing the introduction of the brand new socket (socket 775) targetted for around Q2 '04, there isn't going to be much in the way of future upgrades processor wise on any current Pentium 4. It's even looking doubtful that the socket 478 Prescott core (the first Pentium 5) processor will be compatible with current socket 478 motherboards due to the (rumoured considerable) difference in the required CPU voltage for the Prescott core and the maximum available on the most recent socket 478 motherboards. This means that the chances are you will be "limited" to the 3.4ghz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition in terms of fastest possible processor for any socket 478 board on the market at the moment.

If you take the above into account, the best on the market at the moment would be the Abit IC7 Max 3 (Intel 875P chipset). It has the features you listed, along with a few that you mentioned not needing (onboard sound, RAID (albeit only via the SATA connectors)). This is under the assumption that money is no object, relatively speaking. If funds are a little tighter then the IS7-G (Intel 865PE chipset) offers almost the same performance and features for much less. I must admit that my personaly experiences with Asus lead me to stay away from them now, so i can only recommend the Abit boards, unless you are open to suggestions of boards by other manufacturers (Gigabyte spring to mind).

Hope this is of some help...
Chris Patten

"Newf !!!" wrote:

I'm a computer Tech. Built many machines over the last 20 years. But, the last 2 years I do mostly server work and networking.

So, I'm out of touch with motherboards, chipsets, and such.

I generally stick to Abit or ASus boards for my home machines. Machines will be used for a lot of things, but i build my machines as gaming machines in mind for speed.

Looking for suggestion for the BEST Intel P4 board right now

1.I do not want an Athlon, please do not say you know what... ...

 

[Bill Davis Jr]

I have an IC7-G that I have been using in my system from it's debut.

Like you I did not care for the on-board sound. I have always been an Soundblaster user for years.

Like Chris I used Asus boards in the past but my last 2 motherboards (P4S8X and the P4PE) had some issues that I could not get resolved.

I had 1 issue with my IC7-G so far and that was a Device Driver in Windows, but I installed something that I quickly removed.

My system:

Abit IC7-G Bios 1.5
P4 3.0c Retail HSF
Crucial 2x 512mb PC3200
2 WD Raptor's Raid 0 SATA 1 & 2
2 WD 120gig on SATA 3 & 4 Raid 0
Sony Dvd-rw PATA Ide 1
Sony Dvd-rom PATA Ide 2
ATI AIW Radeon 8500 128mb
SB Audigy 2 PCI 4
Windows XP Pro w/ SP1 on Disc
Antec Truepower 480

Bill

 

[TomG]

I'm surprised that you haven't updated that bios, Bill. The newer bios sets up to and including 1.7 solve some issues that were present in the 1.5 WRT to hyperthreading (I believe) and SATA.

 

[Bill Davis Jr]

I think I am actually at 1.6. I just Copied and Pasted that config from my Abit Forums signature.

I was going to update to 1.7 but I was reading some were having problems with it and just wanted to wait it out to see. Also I just never got around to it.

Bill

On Sat, 1 Nov 2003 07:55:32 -0500, "TomG"
wrote:

I'm surprised that you haven't updated that bios, Bill. The newer bios sets up to and including 1.7 solve some issues that were present in the 1.5 WRT to hyperthreading (I believe) and SATA.

 

[TomG]

no issues here with 1.7 and in the case of using Maxtor drives on the ICH5-R SATA controller, it corrected some issues with respect to recognizing the drives and improved the performance of the raid controller as I understand it.

 

[Newf !!!]

thanks for the insight Chris. very helpful

nice to see some of the old fella's still here. I used to frequent this group years ago. I knew I'd get some good advice here

thanks to all!