Question on x2 with motherboard

[phillyman36]

Earlier a couple of people said that asus via k8t800 will work with a update bios. (reason i want to keep my Bfg 6800 gt agp form) Is there much of a performance difference between this motherboard and the nforce4 motherboards? What are the major differences?

 

[Furen]

There's a slight difference in performance (the k8t800 pro performs sightly slower) but that's not the main difference. The Nforce4 has gigabit ethernet, active armor, tcp offloading (I think), SATA2, it can raid PATA & SATA drives together, and, of course, it has PCI-e.

 

[phillyman36]

Furen thanks for the response can you briefly tell me about the active armor and tcp offloading. ps how much slower if you had to guess maybe ill just buy a cheaper video card like a 6600 and sell my agp 6800 gt

ps i do alot of dvd decrypting, dvd shrink, multi taksing and photoshop not really into heavy gaming although i do want to try command and C.,

 

[Markfw]

Sounds like the X2 is right down your line.... The dfference is nothing performance wise, just the features listed.

 

[Furen]

Originally posted by: phillyman36
Furen thanks for the response can you briefly tell me about the active armor and tcp offloading. ps how much slower if you had to guess maybe ill just buy a cheaper video card like a 6600 and sell my agp 6800 gt

ps i do alot of dvd decrypting, dvd shrink, multi taksing and photoshop not really into heavy gaming although i do want to try command and C.,

The only compelling feature (for me, at least) is the SATA/PATA raiding. Gigabit ethernet is only worth it if you have a gigabit LAN, you actually use it (Ie. you have a gigabit router or something) and you need the transfer rate. I personally dont so I end up just plugging Cable modems onto it, or just making it join 100BaseT networks. ActiveArmor is nVidia's firewall. I've never gotten it to work properly but I admit I havent really tried to hard (since I have a router anyway). I think the TCP offloading only applies to the software firewall, by the way.

One question: are you going to overclock? If not, or you are only going to do a mild overclock then the ASRock 939dual-SATA2 (or whatever the hell it's called) could be the mobo for you. It has both PCI-e and AGP so you wont be stuck with AGP if at some point in the future you want to upgrade. It comes with 1 (yes, just one) SATA2 port and a few more SATA ports. The drawbacks of this board (aside from it being an ASRock) are that the current overclocking bios only allows 1.35v for vcore on dual-cores (so dont expect going over 2.4GHz on a dual-core, if that), it only has 100BaseT networking. Of course, the mobo is dirt cheap at 69 bucks and has a "Future CPU slot" dunno how useful that will be.