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IT7-Max2, BD7II, BD7IIR - Which one?

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richklein

Member
Joined
Jan 4, 2002
Hi all,

I am in the market for a new P4 based system with the intention of gaming & working. I have a watercooled AMD system & that case will be the new home for the P4 system (sorry amd). I have been an Asus fan for years & now I want sometihng that performs well, or better than the asus from an OC perspective.

Ok, so heres what I think i want:

P4 2.66 (C1 stepping)
or 2.53 (maybe because of the price, maybe not)

Corsair 512 3200xms

Now the mobo, here is where I get confused. I have a switchbox & two other pcs. I dont really want to spend the money getting rid of all the PS2 stuff I have in favor of USB.

I thought I wanted the IT7-Max2 but I hear its made by ECS (no experience with it but heard negative things about it). Again it might not be made by ECS, so what do I know.

I was reading about someone with the P4 2.66, Corsair 3200, and BD7IIR getting 3.4ghz out of a 2.66. I would be plenty happy with a 3.2ghz for everyday usage.

The IT7Max2 is about 80 bucks more than the BD7II.

Anyway some advice would be great.

Or should I just wait for the 3ghzs to come out & the new DDR too?

Thanks,
Rich
 
Here are the main advantages of the IT7 Max2
Serial ATA: Basically, all hard drives over 160GB will use this. With performance limited mostly by rotation speed and seek time, the increased bandwidth will give little improvement in performance.
ATA133 raid: If you use two hard drives on this, it will read and write large files faster. If you usually work with files under 50MB, you probably won't notice the difference. This could also be used as an extra two IDE controllers. Note that the BD7IIR has this too.
Firewire (IEEE 1394): This is a fast interface for networking, digital video cameras, and external drives. Good if you have these things, largely useless if you don't.
USB 2.0: Similar to firewire. The most popular interface for external drives. This or firewire is necessary to run an external CDRW at more than 8X4X8X.
Onboard LAN: So what? NIC cards are cheap.
Basically, go through and see if any of these things applies to your typical usage. If they don't, go with the BD7II.
 
So if I dont plan to get HD's bigger than 160 gigs, & dont use raid, and dont care about firewire ports (my sb audigy has one) & usb 2.0, then i should go for the BD7II

Does the BD7 OC better or worse than the IT7max2?

Are there some memory or FSB features that one has over the other?
 
the IT7 Max2 does not have 8x AGP. Its a Intel 845E chipset which only supports 4x. The radeon 9700 will still work however because it supports 4x.
 
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