Motherboards

[Jester983 0]

Hey guys im looking at upgrading my motherboard and i was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for an Intel pentium 4 based mobo.

Im currently looking at asus motherboards and abit motherboards.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Baphomet 0]

Asus have always given me satisfactory performance. Soyo I heard are good for people who like to tinker and get the best performance out of their system, however I heard they're expensive. To be honest and I don't know much about them. However I heard that Abit wasn't so good. If anyone could tell me why someone would say that about them. I'd personally like to know too what other people who are in the know, think about certain motherboards.

[JAP 2]

I always use Intel motherboards lately.

Very satisfied with them.

Intel Bayfield and Intel Rocklake are both very good P4 boards. Both got sound & Lan onboard, support S-ATA.

MSI is also a very good brand.

Cheers

[HitmanFF 6]

I've been using Asus motherboards since my Pentium I. I've always been very happy with them, never had any troubles whatsoever.

Currently I'm using an Asus P4P800 Deluxe. I'm running an OFP server with an Asus P4P800-VM (video and LAN onboard). Rock solid, good performance all over. The only disadvantage of the P4P800-VM would be the fact that it is difficult to overclock, if you're interested in that. But since it's inside a server in a datacenter 100 km. away from me, I didn't want to overclock it anyway. Stability is the #1 priority for a server...

The P4P800 Deluxe does give lots of possibilities to overclock & tinker. I've had my P4 2.8c running stable at 3.5 GHz.

I think first you have to decide on what you're looking for (everything onboard, budget board, sheer speed, lots of extras, overclocking possibilities, possibility to upgrade processor in the near future etc.). That way you can get good advice on what board to buy

[Grizzlie 0]

I have Abit IC-7G.

For me very good MB. Rather not for overlocking, but stable and with alot of features.

[Major Fubar 0]

Well, from personal experience, I've always found Asus to be very good. At the time I got my Asus, most PC mags and sites agreed that they were the best brand of mobos...

[BraTTy 0]

Yes Asus is a very good board, I still have a A7A 266 in operation with a Xp2400+

The features I want in a new mb is some of this:

AGP 8x

USB 2.0 (more ports the merrier)

ATA 133

800 bus (you said p4)

DDR pc2700 (ddr333) or better

Now in the Asus line of mb's,these features are only in the 100$+ motherboards

Other things that are handy:

SATA Hd controller

More ddr ram slots the better,if it has 4 it prolly can do 4 sticks of ddr400

Whether I use the onboard sound or not i still want it on the mb

Onboard video isn't necessary but handy for when I upgrade ,I can sell the mb to someone else and not donate a video card

edit: Oh on the performance...my A7A 266 is rated well and alot of Asus boards are and mainly because they actually clock them a tad higher

A good example is when I was running a Tbird 1333 ,it actually ran at 1334 on my Asus board So of course it would have good benchmark ratings (something like 33.3 base bus speed)

[toadeater 0]

I've heard more people having problems with Asus boards than Abit boards recently. Look on their forums and see what customers are saying. I have an Abit AI7 which I bought a couple of months ago, don't have any complaints about it.

If you get good RAM and a good power supply (350 watts minimum these days, two fans), you shouldn't have any problems (unless you get a dead on arrival motherboard) and could overclock on stock cooling. Corsair, OCZ, GEIL, Kingston, and Mushkin are all good RAM choices. The best are Corsair XMS series, OCZ Enhanced Latency series,  or GEIL Golden Dragon series.

I also wouldn't bother with a 875 board and get a 865 board instead. 865 boards from Abit and Asus both have 857-like memory acceleration tech that give them basically equal performance for about $70 less. That money you save you can spend getting better RAM and maybe an extra fan.