P4PE or PX845PE?

Im still caught in a dilemna betweening choosing chipsets. These two are practically exactly the same, perhaps actual user experiences may create a gap between the two.

On a sidenot however, I was surprised to find out that all the new 845pe motherboards do not support Raid 0, 1, or 0+1 with parallel ata drives! Can you believe that? Theres still like no new sata hard drives out, and these motherboards are taking this feature away from us. The only way to utilize the raid on these chipsets is that you must have a sata drive in the raid array. Abit dealt with this very well in there 845PE chipset by supplying it with a sata to pata converter. To bad all the others do not do this. Now i must go out of my way to find one.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. The Asus P4pe to me, seems to have a little better feature set, the onboard sound is better, than the Albatron PX845PE. The p4pe has gigabit lan, and it has an in windows motherboard utlility, which from what i heard, the Albatron does not.
However, to the Albatrons advantage, what i like, first, the chipset is dipped in a real nice looking silver! It just looks amazing. Next is that, as much as i understood it, in the bios you can use this divider to utilize faster ram, essentially ddr400 when you are ocing. I cant remember where, but i saw a benchmark comparison between these mb's and the albatron using this memory feature scored a bit higher than the asus and others. O yea, last thing is that the Albatron is like $30 cheaper than the Asus.

Is the Asus worth it? Which one overclocks better? I wanna hit 3ghz with a 2.53 and Corsair xms3200.

also, for some strange reason I do not feel as attracted to the abit it7 max2 v2, as these, but maybe someone can change my mind.

p.s. is an it7-max2 the same thing as an it7-max2 v2 board? just checking. specifically, which is this board: http://www.googlegear.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=240104

Thanks everyone.

those 3 motherboards are rated pretty much like that:

Albatron pro version (not II) is for an overclocker on a budget, it being only 80 bucks, your ultimate mobo when you dont have money. On avarage it overclocks better than asus, but a bit worse than abit.

Asus is feature rich and a very stable board, expect to pay more for the name and 'stability' avarage overclocker and nice set of features.

Abit is the king of the hill, but also VERY expensive, around $170 - you can get 2 albatrons for that price. It seems to overclock better than asus and albatron, but not by much. It also has unbeatable features such as raid sata lan and premium sound.

However new granite bay boards are about to roll out, i'd reccomend waiting.

Sounds good. Thanks for the help. After reading into the Abit, I think i will actually get it. It is a little pricey, but looks good. About the granite bay tho, personally u think its worth the wait? I was actually going to wait for it, ive been waiting a few months now, and after reading benchmark reviews on it, it doesnt seem to be that big of a deal. It also comes with a hefty price tag and the fact that most of the boards are no where to be found yet. When should we start seeing more of them?

By the end of January we might have 3 or 4 to choose from and they should go down to the price of that Abit. They are great overclockers, a guy from Tokyo, chainbolt, is running it at 190 single bank and 180 dual ddr on vapor chill, has all overclocking options you will ever need, so it doesnt seem to be that bad of a setup

acesea said:

p.s. is an it7-max2 the same thing as an it7-max2 v2 board? just checking. specifically, which is this board: http://www.googlegear.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=240104

Click to expand...

the difference between the abit it7 max 2 and the itz max2 ver 2 is that the ver 2 is a PE chipset which means it supports HT . and that board @ googlegear looks as if it is not the ver 2 =(