Best Dual Pentium III Motherboard

[JamieJamie]

What is the best dual pentium III motherboard? Is the 2505T the best? Cost is also an issue.

 

[AndyHui]

It's actually hard to give a really good recommendation...since you either have "low end" boards based on the VIA Apollo Pro 133D, or go straight to the expensive top end on the ServerWorks chipsets.

If cost is an issue, perhaps you should look at the ASUS CUV4X-D or CUV4X-DLS.

 

[FishTankX]

You know, Andy, youre rulling out the 840 boards..

 

[Athlon4all]

<< You know, Andy, youre rulling out the 840 boards.. >>

True, but you both are forgetting the best of them all (except for ServerWorks). And that is IWill's DVD266-Ru. It has On-board Audio, 4 DDR DIMM slots, RAID and I think is the best Dual PIII board for both Tualatin and CuMine.

 

[FishTankX]

OH NO! NOT VIA! RUN AWAY! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!! NOOO!O!!O!O!O!O!O!O!O!OOO!!! PLEASE ANYTHING BUT THAT! NOOO!OOO!OO!!O

(Actually Via isn't that bad if you like debugging your board for bugs every 5 weeks and downloading 4 in 1's every time you go for a drink of coffee.. just take *ALOT* of work and *ALOT* of time to get everything working nicley. Looks like the Apollo Pro 133D aint *THAT* bad, but I would still trust the OR840. Best in it's class!)

 

[BreakApart]

The best? That kinda leaves it wide open...
What features are you looking for?
Slot-1, socket, SCSI, IDE, on-board LAN, on-board video/sound? You kinda left it open.

Slot-1 boards i like the Asus P2B-D/DS and Tyan Tiger 100
Socket boards it all depends what you want on-board...LAN, SCSI, etc, etc.
840 boards if you don't mind buying new memory...

I refuse to buy another VIA single CPU board, i'll be d^&*$ if i'm going to touch a dual CPU VIA board.

 

[ahsia]

ABIT VP6 got some good reviews....

Reviews of ABIT VP6

About $130....

 

[Deceiver]

Yeah, you kinda left it wide open in terms of what you actually want.

If you want a simple cheap dual P3 board, then I highly recommend the VP6. I've been extremely happy with mine. I've had about a year now, and I haven't had problems. My initial (and only) install of Win2k was tricky because it was my first time working with a Via chipset and I had issues with ACPI and IRQ sharing. But it wasn't to hard to figure everything out, and it's been running smoothly ever since.

 

[Sestar]

Compgeeks.com has a pcchips board with a via 694x chipset for 50 shipped, its not that great(no overclocking features, 4 pci slots) but I have had no problems with it so far(then again I am running a single celery on it. )

 

[GFORCE100]

I don't know why you are bashing VIA boards, sure some are bad but don't forget the chipset is only a component, the capicitors, board PCB design and how many layers it has is also a factor. I have a Supermicro P3TDDE board based on the VIA Apollo Pro 266T chipset and it's a wonderful board I have to say. Very fast and very stable. It will run dual 1.4GHz Pentium III-S chips no problem and has FSB speeds upto 200MHz.

It is also faster than cheap SMP boards based around the VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset. It's not the cheapest board but a solid one with the power to perform.

 

[BreakApart]

Did you just compare one VIA chipset -vs- another VIA chipset, while trying to justify VIA quality?

From personal experience i would never use a VIA chipset in a business server, i.e. dual cpu. Just my humble opinion.

 

[GFORCE100]

So far not a single comptability problem and no BSOD. I would say a lot also depends on the PSU you use, at the moment it's running off an Enermax 550W one.

 

[Deceiver]

True, a Via chipset probably isn't the best for a business class environment, but he hasn't mentioned what he's using it for. If it is for personal use, a via board is perfectly fine. I've had relatively no problems with my Abit VP6.