which P4 board? sis645?

[smp]

A friend here at work is building a P4 based system with a 1.6a. He wants quiet, so he's getting P4 and the prices are right on the Sis645 boards.
Are these boards good? Like the Asus P4S333? The price is good on this board and it does DDR333 and has audio. What other options are there? For DDR, that would be a good price/performance ratio. He's pretty intent on Asus because of good experience with them and their good reputation.
Also, anyone know if the retail fan on a 1.6 P4 is much quieter than a retail fan on an AMD XP 1700?
Thanks.

 

[Athlon4all]

Hmmm. Well, P4S333 is solid and it does oc decently so I would not hesitate to recommend it. The SiS 645 boards are very stable and high performing. I personally would rather have a RDRAM board, but P4S333 is a solid board and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it. Other solid boards that are decently priced are EPoX 4SDA (I think that's the name, it's their SiS 645 board. Avialable around $100), Asus P4B266-C ($115 or so, 845-D. Great ocer), and MSi 645 Ultra ($75, great board as well. Sis 645)

 

[daclayman]

I just (6hrs ago) put together a system with the Asus P4S333. Design?!? What design? Monkeys coulda got lucky and did better than this: ATX connector snug against stock heatsink and 1/2 cm. from your power supply in a horizontally mounted, mid tower. The 4 pin molex 12V connector must be removed to insert a 3rd stick of RAM. 4 pin CD input on the motherboard is directly under the monitor out of my VisionTek GeForce2 GTS AGP video card. An AGP video card with TV tuner, etc. may not fit here. I will say the IDEs/floppy connectors are positioned right and the onboard sound is quite good. Overclocking is a breeze with 1mhz FSB adjustments, though the PCI divider doesn't change until you hit the next even FSB speed (132mhz FSB = 43.5mhz PCI bus! = 87mhz AGP!! not 31 - 32 / 62 - 64 at that FSB setting like on most boards). No crashes, seems really stable. currently 1.6a @ 2192mhz (137fsb)

Clayton

 

[smp]

Thanks.
Overclocking isn't really too much of a concern actually.
As long as everything fits onto the board in the end I don't think it's too much of a problem, as long as everything works.
Anyone know if a P4 1.6a retail heatsink is actually quieter than a XP 1700 retail heatsink though? (I know it's a tangent)
Thanks.