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Who makes the best chipsets for the Socket 478 Pentium4?

beansbaxter

beansbaxter

Senior member
Past years of experience have allowed me to form strong opinions about which motherboards to choose when setting up an AMD system, as some chipsets respond better and have less issues than others.

But I just picked up a good deal on an Intel Pentium4 2.8Ghz Socket 478, and as I look for motherboards, of the three main chipsets - which one has the least amount of issues?

On a side note, whats the best, low-cost Socket 478 solution, that anyone would recommend on the Asus side of the house?
 
low-cost and Asus in the same sentence? ha! Well, i suppose that's a relative term. You're paying a double premium for an intel chipset and an Asus board.

I've liked this board a lot for P4 systems: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813131484

I've had very few issues with Via chipsets [knock on wood] but avoid SiS like the freaking plague....I'll take the intel 865 platform any day and pay the premium.

 
hmmm it's a toss up between SIS and Intel, the SIS 655TX chipset is the fastest for skt 478, but the i875P is much more common...and the differences are ah heck all in terms of performance.

reliability wise, anybody who states that SIS is crap, just has their head up their ass...the work perfectly fine, SIS has very good drivers as well.

motherboard wise, if you can find one the Gigabyte GA-8S655TX Ultra is probably the fastest availible and to my recolection the only board the uses the 655TX chipset, maybe Asus did too.

But as far as availiblity goes if you must use skt 478, and there is nothing wrong with that I have a 3.06ghz@3.45ghz skt478 on a GA-8S648FX-L and it is bloody fast and stable, go for a i875p based board, the GA-8KNXP and Asus P4C800 are good ones, if a little pricey.

If you are only interested in using a single channel memory setup, go for a SIS 648FX or i848P board, they offer good performance and can be very cheap too. Asus uses both these chipsets in motherboards and should be very easy and cheap to pick up.



 
Look no further then the Asus P4P800SE (already linked above)... I too have this MB (actually own two of them), and they are BY FAR the best, most stable and best balance of features MB for the socket-478. If you want your socket-478 to soldier-on reliably for years, get this MB... the intel 865PE chipset is top of the line and the Asus MB his high quality and very stable.
 
I've actually have had decent luck with VIA and SiS chipsets as well as Intel (which I voted for in Poll). The major "problem" with most of these other chipsets is overclockability. Only VIA's latest socket 478 chipset, the PT880, had AGP/PCI locks and even then it wasn't good for over about 220MHz FSB, meaning it was terrible for overclocking "C" CPUs but great for lower FSB CPUs. Indeed I've had an MSI PT880 Neo board for two years and it's running a P4 2.53 @ 3.33GHz - around 175MHz FSB. I've had a few SiS chipset boards, both MSI and Asus brand based on these chipsets: 645DX, 648, 651, 661, 661GX. They have all worked fine, but again overclockability varied. I know older ones like 645DX and 651 didn't have AGP/PCI locks, but the newer ones did... if the board manufacturer implemented them. Also, Asus made some boards using the SiS 655 chipset that were supposedly really nice and gave the Intel 865PE chipset boards a run for the money - even in high FSB overclockability.
 
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