need some advice on socket 478

[Saist]

basically, thing is that I was an early adopter on Radeon 9100 IGP, grabbing the Asus P4800-VM within a week of it shipping to retailers. Now, the board is ... well... on it's way out, but due to my tendancy to avoid Intel platforms with a passion I don't have any other socket 478 boards on hand to put the processor into...

so... I decided to just for once go out and purchase a good intel board... and promptly choked when finding the Abit IC7-G's $142 price tag.

So now... I'm just looking for input... I really don't want to spend over $80... heck, I really don't want to spend over $60 on a new board for a 2.6ghz P4...

any reccomendations on what's good in that price range?

 

[Zap]

Well, do you need the replacement board to just function, or would you like extras such as overclocking, onboard video, GBE, dual channel RAM, mATX or ATX, etc.

At $142, you'd be better off selling the CPU and using the $142 plus profits from the CPU sale to purchase an A64 setup.

Have you considered RMAing the motherboard to Asus? I've heard that they're good about honoring warranty. Even if you don't have a receipt, they'll warranty from 3 years from manufacturing date. At least, that's what I've heard.

For dual channel RAM, no onboard video, normal ATX...

You can get boards with the VIA PT880 chipset in your price range. Some of these have very mixed reviews so YMMV. I have the MSI PT880 board and it works within some limitations. Using SATA, couldn't overclock a single MHz. Wouldn't take PCI SATA cards. Other than that, still works fine.

The venerable 865PE chipset is still available starting in your price range. In the $70 dollar range, can get Abit, Epox and Gigabyte.

Asus P4S800D-X at $60 uses the SiS 655FX chipset. Not too many reviews, but scores a perfect 5/5 from all of them. Foxconn has some boards on the same chipset starting at $35. They are usually considered "functional with no overclocking."