Seeking input

[Kylere]

Building a purely gaming machine, cost is a consideration, but not the only since I am spacing out buys over a few months. I have already chosen and purchased case, optical drives, cooling options, cabling and power supply. Have chosen video card, sound(but this may vary depending on MoBo), HD.

I had initially chose the P2S8X Asus MB with a 2.4G 533 processor. But the fact that it does not even unofficially handle DDR400 is backing me off. So let me specify my 2 sides on the issue.

I want a P4 supporting, 8X, LAN( 10/100), DDR400 or RDRAM 1066 support up to 2GIG. Better than basic sound would be handy but I can toss in an Audigy if not. System will have 1GIG initially of whichever RAM. Basically at this point I am looking at Gigabyte 8SG667 versus the Asus P4S8X, taking the issues of spacing and lack of LAN of the Giga, versus the lack of better than PC2700 support for the Asus.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

 

[Vette73]

Newegg.com has your board HERE!!!!!!

It has Lan, 6ch sound, firewire, AGP 8x, ata 133, usb 2.0, and digital inputs/outputs for sound.
It cost only $125 shipped and has a 3 year warrenty (maybe 5 years?)

But that is the only board that will have all that and do what you want.

 

[Kylere]

I had looked at it prior to reading what anandtech had to say about it

However, some problems cropped up once we started testing DDR400 memory. First off, one of the 3 DIMM slots was completely unable to operate DDR400; it wouldn't even boot into Windows XP. We don?t know the exact cause for this malfunction, but we are working with VIA to pinpoint the issue.

Despite this anomaly, we were able to operate the DDR400 memory in the other two DIMM slots available on the P4PB 400. With DDR400 in either of the two slots, we were able to boot into Windows XP and run some of the stress tests and benchmarks we needed for DDR400 scores. Unfortunately, the P4PB 400 failed to complete SYSMark 2002 among other benchmarks, even after several tries. But even though the DDR400 memory was mostly operational using the 2 other slots, it definitely wasn't as trouble free as we would have preferred (random crashes and reboots galore).

So this still leaves me stuck, honestly I am thinking of breaking down and throwing out the concept of DDR400 entirely, chosing a lesser option and then doing new MOBO/RAM when DDR-II hits.