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Which i850 board?

D

Domain

Junior Member
I've been somewhat removed from upgraditis, but it has recently hit me again, and I desperatly need to retire my old PII400/440BX. Unfortunately, I haven't had time, nor want to keep up with the changes in the past few years, and particularly the quality of brands available.

So, I'm hoping someone could share some advice/opinions on i850/478 mPGA motherboards. Currently i've been looking at two particular boards, the Intel 850MV (Audio/No Lan), or the Asus P4T-E (No Audio/ No Lan).

Has anyone had any positive/negative experiences with either of these boards? Or other brands/models you would recommend? I'm not concerned about overclocking (or negligible performance differences), just a rock solid board, that will hopefully provide me with a decent capacity for future upgrades.

I appreciate any information you can provide,

Domain
 
Both are very good boards. The Asus is the better board if you want to overclock and so far has been as stable as my D850MD/MV boards. If you are not into overclocking I would highly suggest the D850MVL with audio and lan. The audio and lan solution are both very good and if you do not need the extra PCI slots a D850MDL board works great in a smaller case.
 
Another board to consider is the Abit TH7II.

In a different direction...

There are the SiS645 boards, which support DDR ram....

http://www.ecsusa.com/p4s5a.cfm

http://www.msicomputer.com/product/detail_spec/645ultra.htm

I have the ECS P4S5A board, and it's been very solid. If it was a primary system for me I probably would've paid the extra $$$ for the MSI 645Ultra and PC2700 DDR.

Asus also has a board, but I am not sure it's on the streets yet...

http://usa.asus.com/mb/socket478/p4s333/overview.htm#
 
I appreciate all the replies,

I'm leaning toward the Asus P4T-E, after looking over the documentation, configurability, etc. I've been using Intel boards for about 6 years, without a hitch, but I got a chance to play around with a D850GB, and it seemed to have quite a few problems (could have just been bad luck though).

I'm not big on onboard components, LAN would be acceptable, but onboard audio is useless to me, since i'll be running a SB Audigy. Unfortunately, it seems 98% of all the i850 boards have onboard audio, but I guess it can always be disabled.

Anyway, I'm going to do a little more research before I decide. Once again I appreicate the responses/suggestions.

Domain
 
Get the Asus P4T-E. I don't believe that the Intel board could be any more stable, and I have yet to see proof otherwise. The P4T-E doesn't have lan- but does have better O/C options and is probably slightly faster

The TH7 II is very feature packed and has great O/C options- but it would be a step down in terms of reliability IMO.
 
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