Competition to 865 or 875 chipset (intel)?

[slackerinabox]

I'm looking for a P4 motherboard with dual channel memory and an AGP slot (not PCI-X) and I'm wondering if tel 875 chipset is still my best bet or if there's a good solution from VIA or sis.

Thanks!

 

[Thor86]

You can't go wrong with i865/i875 chipsets. 🙂

 

[stevty2889]

Stay with the 865/875, I would never run a P4 with a VIA chipset, and sis doesn't have anything that competes well with the 865/875.

 

[Midnight Rambler]

The Asus P5P800 is a decent lower cost board, but it's based on the ' 865, not the ' 875.

 

[Zap]

Are you guys sniffing burnt capacitors or something? SiS and VIA both make fast, stable and feature-filled chipsets for socket 478. Sure, the Intel chipsets may be more popular and the 875P may hold the "1% faster" performance crown, but SiS and VIA do make competitive chipsets. The only feature I can think of that the Intel chipsets have over the alternatives is the CSA network port. Most Intel chipset boards on the market have cheaper network alternatives, so unless you explicitly were looking for the CSA NIC, no difference there. The only big issue right now is that these boards using alternate chipsets seem difficult to find, but then again socket 478 choices seem dwindling overall.

VIA's chipset is the PT880. I reviewed my MSI PT880 Neo-LSR here. Generally speaking, most of the VIA boards are limited to about 220MHz FSB. They do have a working AGP/PCI lock. The boards are cheaper than Intel chipset boards. My MSI board has full overclocking features (except only up to 1.60vcore).

SiS has the 655FX and 655TX chipsets. Don't know what the difference was, but those chipsets also support dual channel RAM, AGP/PCI lock, yadda yadda. Asus made some great boards using these chipsets that were excellend overclockers. They seem to be really similar to the Intel chipsets even up to very high FSB speeds (250MHz+).

 

[uOpt]

Enough negative experience with Via and Sis in the past. If there's an Intel chipset available I'd take it.

The higher cost is neglectable compared to the cost of RAM and everything else.

Plus mainboards made with i865 and i875 often make much more conservative choices when it comes to onboard sound and ethernet. No realtek ethernet for me if I can help it, and I'd take 5.1 sound with proven drivers for Windows and out-of-box drivers for Linux and FreeBSD over some funky 7.1 that makes me plug in a PCI card to get sound.