Good P4 board. Overclocking not needed.

[Jon]

Since converting to AMD over a year ago, I know practically nothing of the P4 world and have been called upon by my uncle to build him a new one for Christmas.

As far as components go, I've got no problems there...I've dealt with plenty of P4 machines at work, they just happen to be OEM.

What I'm needing is a reliable P4 platform for at least a 2.53GHz P4 chip...he may even want to go for the 3.06. So far, I've pretty much got everything staked out, just need a board that has USB headers as he stated specifically that he wanted front USB access for whatever case I go for. Decent onboard sound and even LAN would be pluses.

Price is not much of a concern, but there is definately no reason to go overboard here. What he wants is reliability, functionality and a decent degree of upgradability. He knows absolutely nothing about overclocking and it won't be done at all on this machine.

[ScaryDecoy]

Have you looked at Intel Boards?
http://www.intel.com/products/desk_lap/motherbd/index.htm?iid=ipp_home+dsktp_motherbds&

All their boards are listed on the right hand side. These boards have no O/C features what so ever but, they are the most stable board I have ever used.

[toymaker]

IMHO the best non-overclocker's board

http://www.intel.com/design/motherbd/bt2/index.htm?iid=ipp_dlc_deskmb+spot_d845pebt2&

[Jon]

Thanks...that looks about what I'm after. Haven't checked on prices, but I had an Abit BE7 picked out that seems to be almost identical to that Intel board, minus the RAID. Have to do some price matching and go for there.

Thanks for the recommendations though...I figured Intel would be a good choice.

[SHODAN]

I've heard good things about SuperMicro (http://www.supermicro.com).

[ScaryDecoy]

I have found the intel boards are sometimes a few dollars cheaper,but not much. They are a good board because Intel testss these boards the same way they test their Chipsets. Lots and lots of testing is done. I would say they are the most stable Intel board. I only ever had to RMA one, it was a CC820 board, and the only reason I did was I got a vc820 board with 128mb pc-800 rdram for free. I couldn't say no. Then they messed up and sent me a 2nd board with memory. So I ended up going from a cc820 with 64mb sdram to a vc820 with 256mb Rdram and selling the 2nd board for $50 on ebay. So as you can see intel Tech support was great to me. :D