Looking for highend P4 board...

[le3tplaya]

I was looking at the Gigabyte 8ihxp.

-i850 chipset
-533mhz bus
-RDRAM (800/1066)
-ata133 raid
-etc

Seems like a pretty damn good board to me. Or is there something out there thats better, and has similar features, that I should consider looking at??

 

[le3tplaya]

Also what are the performace advantages of PC1066 (RDRAM) VS PC333/400 (DDR) ?? Am i better off with a very similar Gigabyte board that just has DDR instead or RDRAM? Keep in mind I'm interested in performace, not price!

 

[senior guy]

If price is of no concern, then the i850E chipset still outperforms any DDR chipset (but not by much), plus it's a very stable platform. Rambus' advantage over DDR is its greater bandwidth. The big caveat for you to consider here is that the major trend (even by Intel) is toward DDR, not Rambus and with the intro of Intel's 7205 'Granite Bay' (dual-channel DDR) chipset, scheduled for later on this year, any advantages of Rambus will evaporate.

 

[IntelConvert]

Actually, if price is not a concern, you definitely should wait another month or two. Intel will soon release the 3.06GHz P4, the first CPU with enhanced hyper-threading (HT) technology. It won't be cheap, but you indicated that price is of no concern. In order to take advantage of HT, you will need a chipset that supports it. The first chipset to support HT is the i845PE (single-channel DDR) which will be officially announced/released on Monday. If you want dual-channel DDR, you will have to wait another couple of months for the 7205 chipset, which also supports AGP 8X, for what that's worth...

 

[le3tplaya]

I dont totally mean that price is not a concern...

In this upgrade im looking to get a nice mobo, like the gigabyte, around a 2.53mhz/533 p4, 512megs of PC1066, and 2 80gigers for a raid.

Figuring out the wich mobo to get is the hard part, everything else is easy. Any suggestions on something similar to the 8IHPX but better would be greatly appreciated!

 

[IntelConvert]

IMHO the GA-8IHXP* is the best of the i850E boards out there and the P4 2.53 the 'sweet-spot' (price-wise) of the Northwoods. If you go this route, I recommend Kingston PC1066 256MB RIMMs.

* Be sure to get the latest version of the board which is the 8IHXP2.

Good luck.

 

[le3tplaya]

What was changed in version 2. Just bug fixes and such??

 

[IntelConvert]

They changed the onboard sound from Creative to Realtek (6ch). Supposedly, other revs dealt with misc. refinements, but I can't tell you anymore as Gigabyte has not released any details.

BTW, even though the model indicates Version 2, the Revision # on the new board is 3... sort of confusing.

 

[le3tplaya]

interesting, thanks for the heads up!