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Need: RAID, sound, o/c'ing, Which mobo...

D

DDDavey

Member
I've been outta this for a while now 🙂 Building a system for a friend. Figure if I get a raid board then if the gets more than 4 IDE devices he can hook them up. Integrated sound b/c he doesn't need anything fancy. Overclockable prefer so that can be messed around with. If you can give me a good reason not to go with raid, like just get another PCI IDE card, that will be good too, seems RAID boards are kind of limited these days, or as far as KT266A ones anyways...I know there's a couple AMD761 ones.

Processor will be an XP 1700, with 1 stick of Crucial 256MB DDR. No need for CNR/AMR slot or whatever, don't need ISA either. 6PCI preferred, but not necessary.
 
a perfect board would be the Soyo Dragon+, it's an all-around great board. It's performance is right near the top for KT266A boards, and it is probably the most feature rich. The integrated sound is excellent, the RAID/ATA100 works ok and the onboard Ethernet would round up the what makes this board stand out from a standard board like the Shuttle AK31 just to name one. Of course the board is in the $140-$175 range but that's average for a board with all those features (definitally a better bargain than the ASUS A7V266E). I've built a few systems with the board and I was very happy with it. Other excellent boards would be:

ASUS A7V266E (integrated hardware sound, RAID)
IWill XP333 Raid (Ali Chipset with DDR333 support and integrated hardware sound)
MSI K7T266 PRO2-RU (the software based integrated sound kind of sucks, comes with RAID and USB 2.0)

There are many other boards, these are just examples. I'm curious about the IWill board, I would buy the Soyo... another interesting board would be an nForce board.
 
Dragon Plus is my recommendation. It has everything you want, the only negative about the board is the lack of vcore control over the RAM. But my Dragon is running at a 148 Mhz FSB as I type, so you still have plenty of headroom to mess around with some overclocking fun. I also have an XP 1700, but I went with Corasir PC2400--running Cas 2 @148 ain't too shabby.
 
Yeah, the Corsair memory is excellent. I was running that in a Soyo at 150FSB no problem. It was rated at Cas2 and I think it was only listed at PC2100 at the time... I haven't seen it though lately, I believe they changed the speed rating to PC2400 since then. It was funny I bought it at less than $100 and about a week later it was around $200.
 
Another vote for the Soyo Dragon+

The Abit KR7A-Raid is worth a look, since it seems to be of high-quality. Since your friend doesn't need good sound, you can toss in a Sound Blaster 128 for around $10 on the Abit. The Abit also has 6 PCI slots 🙂
 
save you money and get a XP333-R cheaper that Soyo better OCer and more and higher Vcore options and no Via! 😛 and the same C-media 5.1 sound as well. 😛

second choice shuttle AKGT35 nice board great features and still a good pricetag.

anything higher than $125 shipped you are paying for name brand only🙁
 
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