Ditto on the P3V4X, but be warned: this board gives you back what you put into it. If you just throw a box together you'll get throw-together performance. But if you're willing to learn how to tweak the board to maximum benefit, it wil reward you with insane performance.
My system in detail:
- P3-700 SL454 (cB0 stepping, week 20 Malaysia retail) overclocked to 1035 MHz (148 MHz FSB), on Asus S370-133 rev. B03 slotket at 1.80v. Cooled by recirculated water and 80-watt TE Dist. potted TEC (Peltier) module.
- Asus P3V4X, with 1005 BIOS. Heatsink compound added to "greenie" (Northbridge heatsink). Heatsink atached to ICS clock generator chip.
- Inwin Q500 full-tower case, with 300-watt Athlon-rated PS. Ambient temps are usually ~30 deg. C during the day. Case modified to add one 120mm case fan to the front, and two top-panel 80mm blowholes for the Senfu radiator fans. Front bezel holes enlarged slightly to increase airflow.
- 2x 128 MB Mushkin rev. 2 Mosel Vitalic SDRAM running at "auto" clock and 2-2-2-5 timings with 4-way interleaving enabled. (Sandra 2000 reports memory clock as 148 MHz, timings at 6-1-1-1/4-1-1-1, 4-way interleaving enabled. Memory benchmark result: 415/477.)
- LeadTek WinFast GeForce2 GTS 32MB DDR, overclocked to 210 MHz core, 360 MHz memory in AGP slot. Drivers are Detonator 3 reference drivers, version 6.31. Highest recorded score in 3DMark 2000 1.1, default benchmark: 7697
- Netgear FA310TX NICs in PCI slot 5.
- Tekram FC395UW SCSI controller in PCI slot 3. SCSI cable quad-folded to make it less intrusive to airflow.
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! Value in PCI slot 4, rev. 2, with LiveDrive connector and digitial-out jack, using LiveWare 3.0 and latest driver revision.
- IBM Deskstar 75GXP 46.5 GB (IDE 0 Master), Seagate Medalist Pro 9.1 GB (IDE 1 Master), and Iomega Zip 100 Insider (IDE 1 Slave) on IDE ports. UltraATA-66 cables throughout.
- Plextor Ultraplex, Plextor Plexwriter, Iomega Jaz, and Umax scanner on SCSI bus.
- MS Intellimouse optical and NMB Right Touch! keyboard.
- Heavily-optimized fresh install of Windows 98 Second Edition. Using VIA's 4-in-1 driver set version 4.25.
- "Massively-multiboot" configuration - 14 Windows versions installed. (The box is used for software development and testing.) Win95, Win95 OSR 2.1, Win98, Win98 SE (two copies), NT 4 Workstation, NT 4 Server, NT 4 Server with BackOffice 4.5, Win2000 Pro (two copies), Win2000 Server, Win2000 Adv. Server, and a backup DOS-prompt with all devices (SCSI devices included) active.
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