Which board should I keep: Asus P4P800-E Deluxe or Abit IC7G

[lastig21]

I have purchased these two boards, and have not used either one yet. I need to return one of them by this evening to get the full refund. The abit board cost $25 more than the Asus.

Which of these boards would you keep and why? Does the Abit perform any better than the Asus? 875P vs. 865PE. I will be using a 3.0E with 2 512MB sticks of DDR400.

 

[JohnAn2112]

Keep the P4P800. From my experience, that board overclocks better and is more stable than the Abit board.

 

[CorumP]

Asus has made the PE chip behave nearly as well as the 875P chip, so I doubt you will see any dropoff in perfomence. The Asus will also probably be more stable as well.

 

[lastig21]

For anyone interested, I decided to keep the Asus (because of the $25 savings). I ran a series of tests on both boards, and they performed nearly identical. I'll list my findings below.

I used Corsair PC4000 for both boards (cas 3 I believe) with memory acceleration turned on for the p4p800-e. I used 2 sata WD800JD's in raid 0 for the file system benchmark. The raid was created on each motherboards 3rd party raid controller (promise for asus and silicon image (name?) for abit.

Sandra Scores:

Cpu Arithmetic - IC7-G winner
IC7-G = 8789 & 3472/6263
P4P800-E = 8727 & 3450/6226

Cpu Multimedia = P4P800-E winner
IC7-G = 21264 & 28256
P4P800-E = 21284 & 28318

Memory = P4P800-E winner
IC7-G = 4649 & 4713
P4P800-E = 4773 & 4708

File system = IC7-G winner
IC7-G = 75MB/S
P4P800-E = 71MB/S
Though the Abit controller does seem faster, I have read more problem stories about this controller as well.

3D Mark 2001 SE - P4P800-E winner
IC7-G = 11096
P4P800-E = 11127
I am definitely not a gamer, but wanted to see who came out on top in this test. I was using a 64MB Radeon 8500 for 3dmark.

Overclocking - IC7-G winner (no definitive numbers)
The abit board was definitely easier to overclock. I think both boards could run the cpu at the same speeds, but the asus seemed much more taxing on the memory (even with memory acceleration turned off). With the abit I was able to hit a fsb of 237 at 1.4125v, the asus made it to 233 at the same cpu voltage. Max load temp on the IC7-G was 65C (scary to see), while only 50C on the asus using a cheap coolermaster heatsink. The abit board does seem to overvolt the entire system compared to the asus (possibly why there is more stability at higher speeds).

Conclusion:
The PC4000 memory was borrowed, and my PC3200 can't even go above 215fsb (210 on the asus). For the price difference, I felt the Asus was the better buy. If I was only interested in overclocking, I felt the abit was the better motherboard. It consistently was able to reach higher speeds with the abit. Because of my memory limitation, I decided to save the money and go with the Asus. Both systems "felt" just as snappy, and the benchmarks were very similiar.