I think I just found my dually motherboard... :-)

[Viper GTS]

ABIT's VP6

Looks like EXACTLY what I need. That board, another P3/ArctiCooler, & I'll be in business. With ATA/100 RAID, even!

Thank you, ABIT!



[EDIT]I'll be damned if I can figure out what chipset that board uses. It says it supports AGP4X, so it can't be BX... WTF is it?[/EDIT]

Viper GTS

 

[loogie]

bah..its the hpt370 controller. why not go for the msi 694D dually?

 

[dawks]

I need a xeon dually. But that one looks nice!

 

[Budman]

VP6? My guess is it's a VIA chipset.

 

[NFS4]

It is a VIA chipset...nothing wrong with that

 

[atom]

Bah, I'd rather try to score one of the MSI dual boards. Dually with most of the options of the ABit (sans Softmenu 3) and that great MSI quality. MSI r0x0rs.

 

[Viper GTS]

I'd rather have a BX board, but I guess if the performance is decent & it's stable, I'll take it anyway.

I can't find the MSI boards anywhere, Pricewatch doesn't have them listed anywhere. Plus no reviews anywhere that I've seen. They're my other possibility, though.

Viper GTS

 

[loogie]

here's hardOCP's review

 

[Viper GTS]

Sweet, Loogie...

That's EXACTLY who's review I'd want. That & Anand, & I'd be happy.

Gotta go read it now...



Viper GTS

 

[Viper GTS]

MSI looks tempting, I'll have to see how the ABIT looks once it's released. The RAID is something I want, as is ABIT's SM III. I've been spoiled by my BF6, I guess.

We'll see. For tonight, I need to drag my ass off my computer & go to bed.

Damn, work's gonna come early tomorrow.

Viper GTS

 

[Budman]

The last 3 boards i had were via chipset boards.

Lemme tell ya my next one will NOT be a via.

I am waiting for the AMD DDR boards,Asus or Abit.

 

[Vegito]

I agree! My last three was also VIA, and I gave them away for FREE and they were $90 boards.. don't need the trouble.

Still enjoy my BX6 R2... I wouldn't trust ide raid except for mirroring

 

[Lore]

I'm happy with my P3B-F, running my system at 1.06ghz. But... if someone were to come out with a BX-based dual board that supported coppermines I may be very interested.

 

[Noriaki]

The ABit VP6 is the Via Apollo Pro 133A chipset aka the 694X, and is the same chipset as the MSi 694D and from what I've heard the ABit is the most stable 694X dual so far, but is not flawless either.

Keep in mind that software based RAID (all IDE raid at this point is) eats a fairly healthy chunk of CPU time. If you have two this won't kill you, but just keep it in mind. If something is heavily CPU bound and doen'st need the disk performance IDE RAID can actually knock a good notch off performance.

If you have a true hardware based RAID it won't use CPU, as it has a dedicated processor for the RAIDing. Right now this is only available in SCSI, but I've heard that promise is working on a hardware IDE RAID.