Asus P5PR-VM or Biostar P4M800-M7A

tcsenter

Lifer
Sep 7, 2001
18,841
497
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To make your selection more difficult, there are other (even better) options. I presume based on the shared features of the two boards mentioned that your requirements are AGP8x, DDR400, and mATX.

The Biostar is an oldish board and chipset that only supports previous generation processors (and not even all of those). I would not recommend the P4M800 anymore, with P4M800 Pro chipset available at virtually the same price range. I've used two of these so far with no problems (with Radeon 9550 and GF6200 AGP cards):

PC CHIPS P23G (V3.0) VIA P4M800 PRO - $52.00 shipped
Product Specs: (supports Core 2 Duo, Pentium D, Celeron D, up to 1066MHz bus, DDR and DDR2 slots up to 2GB - cannot be used at the same time)


Instead of the ASUS board based on Intel 865G, there are virtually identical boards available for less:

ASRock 775i65G Intel 865G - $52.00 shipped
Product Specs: (supports Quad Core, Core 2 Duo, Pentium D, Celeron D, up to 1066MHz bus using graphics card instead of IGP)

Gigabyte GA-8I865GME-775-RH-AS - $60.00 shipped
Product Specs: (supports Core 2 Duo, Pentium D, Celeron D, does not support 1066MHz bus)


If you don't already have DDR memory and will be purchasing new RAM, you should seriously consider a board that supports DDR2, because DDR2 is half the price of DDR right now. You can get 1GB of quality DDR2-667 RAM right now for about $35. 1GB of DDR400 is about $70 ~ $75. If DDR2 is an option, in addition to the P23G V3.0 board mentioned above:

ECS P4M800PRO-M2 V2.0 VIA P4M800 PRO - $52.00 shipped
Product Specs: (supports Core 2 Duo, Pentium D, Celeron D, up to 1066MHz bus, DDR2 only)

On a couple final recommendations...

among the Intel 865G boards, I personally would prefer the ASRock over Gigabyte and ASUS. ASRock is the value brand of ASUS, but it has a much better track record of releasing regular BIOS updates than ASUS gives to its value or mainstream boards. Since all ASRock does is value or mainstream boards, it doesn't have a premium line that pulls support resources from 'lower' segment boards that aren't very profitable (unlike the high-end premium models that ASUS has).

If DDR2 is an option, I would go with the ECS over the PC CHIPS, simply because at this time the ECS board has a newer BIOS available with support for all processors supported by the PC CHIPS board, plus Intel's newly released Pentium E2xxx dual cores (based on C2D Allendale). The ECS board also is a little shorter from front to back because it doesn't have the DDR slots (which we presume won't be needed if you go with DDR2).

Of course, neither the PC CHIPS nor ECS offer much in the way of overclocking or performance tweaking. The ASRock probably would offer the best overclocking and performance tweaking features in the BIOS. If that's important.

Clear as mud?
 

agentK

Senior member
Aug 4, 2001
494
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Great! Thanks for taking the time to explain that in detail tcsenter. Looks like i missed a lot since i was last active.