Which motherboard combo is faster/better?

[maintenanceman]

I am about to place an order for a completely new computer at newegg but I can't make up my mind which mb combo to get:

ASUS A7N8X (NFORCE2)
CORSAIR PC-3200 XMS
ATHLON XP 2600/333

or

ASUS P4PE/L (845PE)
CORSAIR PC2700 XMS
PENTIUM 4 2.66/533

Can I please get your unbiased opinion or a link to some benchmarks? Thanks.

 

[dinde]

check this out, also go to the next page there are more tests.
the p4 seems more generally dominent, and overclocks very well so thats the one im getting. (i was deciding between the same processors as u and finally came to my decision, intel)

 

[maintenanceman]

Excellent! The link you gave has the information I was looking for. Thank you.

 

[KidChaos]

I'm planning to upgrade to a nforce2 board soon. Out of all of them, the Abit NF7-S impresses me the most. I would go this route:

Abit NF7-S
AMD XP 2600 (333MHz) OEM
Thermalright SLK-800 heatsink
Panasonic Panaflo 80mm fan
*Two* Corsair 256MB XMS PC3200 memory modules

 

[bgeh]

imo, i would go with AMD because the i845pe usually is slower than the i850e platform which was benchmarked in the link by 5-10%
and i won't believe SYSmark2002 benchmarks until the controversy has been cleared
unless you do heavy video encoding, because there is where intel shines with SSE2 and its high bandwidth
besides, the nforce2 brought gains when paired with a 333MHz FSB AMD cpu
otherwise, it's around the same actually

 

[MarkFahey]

It seems that the majority of users do like the ASUS Mobo's but here is a question? If you go with an Intel processor then shouldnt you get RDRAM? And if you use DDR with an Intel, how much performance (if any) are you losing with not using the RDRAM?

 

[SpideyCU]

Mark, that's being discussed in this thread, in this very same forum. There's some slight controversy over which is the better bang for the buck, but the bottom line is, they're so close in performance, go with whichever is more convenient for you.