P4 motherboard question....

[Sabastian]

Arrgh, there are soo many different reviews of motherboards out there... Anyhow I am looking at upgrading but $$ matter and I am looking for the best price to performance P4 motherboard. Anyone have a suggestion?

 

[Tim Murray]

From what I've heard, a Springdale board with a BIOS that allows PAT to be enabled (or Hyper Path, whatever they call it on Springdale boards) is the best deal. I believe Asus has a BIOS out now, Abit will next week, and every other company will follow suit shortly.

 

[Sabastian]

From what I've heard, a Springdale board with a BIOS that allows PAT to be enabled (or Hyper Path, whatever they call it on Springdale boards) is the best deal. I believe Asus has a BIOS out now, Abit will next week, and every other company will follow suit shortly.

Thanks for that.

 

[Dave Baumann]

Once I've got the A-I-W 9800 PRO I'm going to be reviewing a Springdale. Its an Intel one, so it won't have PAT enabled, but you should be able to gauge performance with just the normal path. However, if you are going for a P4 MB now, IMO it has to be Spingdale or Canterwood - they offer you a far greater logevity than any previous board now, as they have all the connectivity. If you are running a 533MHz FSB CPU at the moment then they will give you room to upgrade there as well, and if you can't afford the RAM you can run on one memory bank (850's had to have both banks populated) giving you the same bandwidth as a current 845, and then later you can put another stick in and get twice the bandwidth!

 

[Ty]

Per Intel, PAT isn't possible on Springdale boards despite what Asus says. Therefore, Hyperpath (Asus tweak) is not really PAT though it does have some benefits.

 

[Roger Kohli]

I have just bought an ABIT IS7 (865PE chipset) which includes SATA RAID 0, Firewire (3 ports) and Gigabit LAN (plus all the usual stuff), all for £100 (which probably equates to $100 at inflated UK prices )

I have only had it for a week, but no complaints.


If you are looking for raw performance, I think that the 875 chipset is a smidgen faster.

 

[Sabastian]

Thanks for the advice guys. Going to take my time though and try to really build a good budget system on my own. I definitly think a springdale or canterwood solution is in the works, there is nothing on the AMD front that compares really. That 800mhz FSB is really hard to overlook.

 

[Roger Kohli]

Just seen Anandtech have a comparison of 20 865/875 boards http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1831&p=1. The IS7 gets their editors choice gold award .

 

[Tahir2]

Roger, where did you get your ABIT board from??

 

[Roger Kohli]

Dabs.com http://www.dabs.com/products/prod-s...tid=770&mid=742&ob=price&stab=ref