Mobo suggestion for P4 Northwood Sock 478

[Cino]

Hi. I am in need of help, I would appreciate if someone suggested a decent mobo for a p4 sock 478 for under $150 based on experience, if it's not to much trouble. Also, is there any difference between the i845 and i850 chipsets, if so, what is it? Thanks in ahead!

 

[PeterPan2002]

Hi everybody! This is my first post. I have the same problem. Which mobo I should choose for my Intel P4 w/rdram? How is the MSI Pro5? Anybody used it? Please give me some ideal. Thanx!

 

[jiffylube1024]

Guys, try doing a search of the forums using strings like 'northwood' , 'p4' , 'rdram' etc... there have been a few 200+ post threads on here discussing this very issue. Make sure you click "select all" for the topics at the bottom of the search page; many people forget to do this and think there are no posts about topics that there is an abundance of.


For the record, some of the best P4 mobos are:

DDR: ASUS P4B266, P4S333, more...

RDRAM: ASUS P4T-E, Abit TH7-II, more...

 

[CoDerEd]

I'm planing on getting 1.8a and still look around for the mobo,
so far I been look toward to Asus P4B266 and P4S333, ABIT BD7-R, and MSI 845Ultra-ARU.

More people here use ASUS as we can find a lot of thread on both side(good and bad),

I'm interested on MSI because of the feature ( I only find 2 threads on anandtech),
specially RAID, well i need it for extra IDE not for the RAID function.
Because I run Win ME and Linux on separate HD for some of my program
in addition my primary HD which has Win XP on it.

I'm using ABIT KR7A now and it was good and stable with my XP1900 at FSB 145,
so i've been thinking for another ABIT mobo since it has RAID also

One more information Intel 845 DDR Motherboard Roundup - December 2001,
From three mobo in there I read some people has problem with the Gigabyte,
2 threads for msi, and even fewer for the SOYO, but the price of SOYO is out of my range
$210 ant Newegg, I guess I'm leaning toward the MSI.

peace

 

[Barrei]

you guys should look at gigabyte 8irxp p4 478 ziff socket , ddr 266 , so many goodies and very overclockable won anandtechs editors gold choice intel 845d chipset

 

[Barrei]

845 chipset is ddr or sdr ram memory 850 chipset is rambus ram, make sure you get the appropriate 845 for whishever memory you choose

 

[senior guy]

<< Hi. I am in need of help, I would appreciate if someone suggested a decent mobo for a p4 sock 478 for under $150 based on experience, if it's not to much trouble. Also, is there any difference between the i845 and i850 chipsets, if so, what is it? Thanks in ahead! >>

The i850 boards require RDRAM (not that there's anything wrong with that), whereas all the other P4 chipsets work with DDR (or SDRAM). While i850 boards are still pretty expensive, PC800 RDRAM can now be had for about the same price as DDR. i850 with RDRAM still delivers the highest memory bandwidth (3.2GB/s) of all P4 (Northwood) platforms and the best 'stock performance', but not by much.

If you want to overclock, then DDR is probably a better way to go. While I'm sure I'll get some arguements here, I think the SiS645 boards are the best platform for the P4 with DDR. It gives you built-in support for both PC2100 (DDR266) and PC2700 (DDR333), a 2.67GB/s peak memory bandwidth (highest for DDR) as well as the highest peak interconnect bandwidth (533MB/s) between north and south bridges. And the best part is that the boards are teriffic values!

 

[Barrei]

My experience with the sis chipsets are stability issues even though they take 333ddr ,they don't support ata133, usb2.0.

 

[senior guy]

<< My experience with the sis chipsets are stability issues even though they take 333ddr ,they don't support ata133, usb2.0. >>

First of all, that's incorrect. You can get that, and a lot more, in the Soyo SY-P4S Dragon Ultra. For example, on-board ATA/133 IDE RAID 0,1,0+1, 10/100Mbps Ethernet controller, CMI 8738 6 channel audio and USB 2.0 ports. $159 at Newegg.

Secondly IMO, ATA/133 is worthless so why pay anything extra for it? And since USB2.0 or Firewire cards can be had for $25, you can always add whichever you want or need (I much prefer Firewire) to a less expensive board.

While the Soyo is a fully featured board, unless you really want all those on-board features, IMO it's smarter to go with either the Asus P4S333 for about $105, or my favorite. the Gigabyte 8SRX for about $90 (they both have 6 PCI slots, so adding a few cards isn't a problem). Furthermore, I haven't heard of any instability problems with these boards as long as the limits of the cpu or memory are not exceeded (of course, that would cause any board to become unstable)!