Granite Bay or P4PE?

[Arhra]

I was looking at both of these motherboards for a system I'm going to build in the near future. The system specs are as follows:
Intel 3.06 HT
1024mb DDR PC 2700
Radeon 9700 Pro OR GeForce FX Ultra (Depends on price, and performance over the R9700P)


I'm not much of an over clocker (I do some, but not a lot), so, with the Granite Bay's largest advantage nearly negated, is it worth buying over the P4PE?

Is the Dual Channel DDR, and 4.2gb/s worth it? Thanks.

 

[Arhra]

Also, would any of the nForce 2 mobos be better for this system?

 

[Athlon4all]

What applications will be run on this system? What onboard features? To be honest, my stance on E7205 is the same I took with 850e vs 845PE. 845PE is slower yes, but E7205's perf. advantage is not big in most apps (5-7%). Those apps where you would see a decent advantage for E7205 is in MPEG Encoding and Professional 3D Workstation apps where you can see up to 12% (see Anandtech's E7205 review for these numbers). So, it really will all fall on what apps. I guess one question I have is why do you want to get a GB of RAM and a 3.06P4? What apps will you be running? The apps that you will be running will be a key factor in deciding E7205 vs 845PE and also your other question (nForce2 and Athlon XP vs 3.06P4)

 

[BDawg]

The difference between dual 266 and single 333 is as small as 333 vs Rambus 1066. If you need a system now, get a PE.

 

[Athlon4all]

The difference between dual 266 and single 333 is as small as 333 vs Rambus 1066. If you need a system now, get a PE.

Exactley, and usually, I'd take 845PE and Single Channel DDR333 over 850e+PC1066 (or E7205+DDR266) but that depends on the apps you [Arhra] will be running.

 

[Arhra]

The PC will be a gaming, video creation, and a bit of image editing software. I might go 'down' to the 2.80 Intel, but it really depends on the price there.

Any thoughts on if I should go 3.06 or 2.8 for such a computer?

Thanks again.

 

[shchong2]

If you are more towards Video processing, then I'd suggest you to get
- P4PE with RAID
- 3.06 with HTT

Reason :-
(1) Using RAID (0 or 1) array will help up alot in Video processing
(2) HTT will give you 2 logical CPU

 

[catsailor]

if the Pc will be used for video creation, you might need a lot of RAM (i.e. more than 1 GIG)
for fast preview rendering to RAM etc. etc., at least I do (AFX, Combustion)

so if that is the case, I would definitely go with a Granite Bay board, since it can apparently
take up to 4 Gigs of Ram easily, while 845 chipset can only fill two slots with double-sided RAM
sticks and one has to use a single-sided RAM stick (which at least over here is impossible to find)
for the third slot, so that on an 845 board in order to get more than 1 Gig of RAM one has to use
1 Gig sticks of RAM, which are pretty expensive and hard to find

somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but that's the reason why I am waiting for Granite Bay

 

[Athlon4all]

catsailor, does make a good point, but it does still depend on whether he can buy that much RAM. I agree that when purchasing that much RAM, DDR266 with Granite Bay is the way to go.

Honestly, that is the only reason I see for you to spend the extra money on E7205. What E7205 gives over 845PE is memory bandwidth, which isn't the biggest factor in Video creation/editing performance (the biggest factors in this application is raw CPU power, RAM, and HD).

As for your question about 2.8 vs 3.06... I honestly can't saw. Someone would need to run benchmarks to see. Honestly, it is very difficult to justify the $400 extra for the 3.06 from a performance perspective in the apps that Anandtech benchmarked. Could HT largely help you? Yes it possibly could, but we don't know for sure, and $400 is a ton of money that you would be paying. I would say to deeply research into the possibly performance advantage of HT before you spend $700 on a 3.06. A possibility I just thought of is since you are possibly waiting for the GF FX, maybe HT P4's will be but in lower clock speeds by then? Only time will tell.