Monster O/C mobo hunt

Hi all,
As some of you already know, I am very soon going to be building a new system. This is what I am going to be getting;
3.0 P4
512mb Corsiar XMSDDR400 (x2)
120 Maxtor HDD ATA/133
Radeon 9700 Pro or Nvidia FX
DVD-RW
CD-RW
Prometia for CPU
Custom W/C rig for GPU and NB
Other misc. stuff

My question to you all is this:
I have been looking at the VIA P4PB Ultra mobo, see this link for a good review: http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NDA1
I am curious as to what you guys think about it.
I know that there is the problem with the BIOS CPU voltage options maxing at only +0.100, but I have already emailed the Tech Dept at VIA asking if there are plans to do a BIOS update to correct this problem. I’ll let you guys know what they say.
Anyways, what do you guys think about this mobo for O/Cing?
Also, if you don’t like it, or think there is a better one out there, let me know so I can go research it. I know that there are some good 845PE based boards out there that are “supposedly” able to handle DDR400. Please don’t just tell me a manufacturer’s name, give me model numbers as well, and links would be great.
Before any of you reply with mobo suggestions, be aware that the mobo I need must have the following requirements;
Intel P4 socket 478
DDR400 support
O/C’able to the max
I don’t need RAID, but it would be nice for future upgrades.

Basically, I want a board that I can O/C and break 21k on 3Dmark2001SE with.

I have never been steered wrong by advice from you guys, so let’s see what you have on this one.

Get an Intel 845PE board. Take your pick from Asus, Abit and Gigabyte. For the best overclocking, I'd pick the Abit BE-7 RAID with one stick of memory.

There is simply no compelling reason to choose a VIA or SIS board over an Intel setup. The Intel boards overclock better, are more reliable, more stable and are cost competitive.



BHD

Don't go with the P4PE. Their onboard power supply is inadequate and outdated to put it very nicely.

The Gigabyte 8INXP is on my "to buy" list, but the best 845 PE board would probably be the 8PE667 Ultra 2 (Ultra is 100 Mbps LAN instead of 1000 and the Pro substracts the RAID that's on the Ultra and keeps the LAN).

The best i845PE mobo is the Abit IT7 Max2 version 2.0.

I can only tell you what I've got. I have a 1.6A CPU running on a IT7MAX2 v2.0 (845PE chipset) at 2.8Ghz. It's Prime95 stable overnight at this speed (I haven't tested 10+ hours yet though but I will very soon, maybe tonight). This is with watercooling. With air, Prime95 would quit pretty quickly at this FSB so I'm pretty sure I'm pushing the limits of my CPU and not the motherboard here. I should however, mention that I'm running at 1.85V's in BIOS so you could say that I'm taking a risk with burning my chip because some people are saying that Northwoods die when run at 1.85 Volts for extended periods (3-4 months). Some other people, on the other hand, are saying that they have been running fine at 1.85Volts for much longer than 4 months now so the jury's still out on the SNDS.

To get back on the subject, I personally think going from the default 100Mhz FSB for a 1.6 ghz chip to 175Mhz FSB is a monster overclock. I specifically chose this motherboard for its overclockability and it's features (it's got RAID and 2 serial ATA ports (so when serial ATA comes out, you can actually run 2 serial ATA drives in RAID configuration which is a plus), firewire ports, built in LAN, 6 channel audio and a LOT of USB ports (6 on the back of the mobo and 4 connecters on the mobo). I think it would be pretty hard to beat the overclockability and the features of this motherboard combined.

Other motherboards might do better in terms of overcloking though. I just told you my personal experience with my motherboard here. It's also possible that this MAX2 V2.0 board can go much higher than 175 FSB with a different chip and/or better cooling. Just to add, I am running 2x512 sticks of PC3500 Corsair DDR memory on this rig and with the 4:5 ratio on the PE chipset, at 175FSB, it is running at 219Mhz (funny thing is WCPUID tells me 219Mhz but when I boot up the computer, the boot screen will tell me 217Mhz!). Unfortunately the 3:4 ratio doesn't work at this FSB because the RAM can't handle that speed and I found out I have to decrease the FSB quite a lot to get it to work at 3:4. At least my timings at 219Mhz are the strictest timings possible (2-5-2-2) so I can't really complain.

Again, in my opionion however, for your setup, you shouldn't really be too concerned about getting a motherboard that can hit insane FSB speeds because even with your prometia, I very much doubt that you will be able to get over 175 FSB stable and I think stability is what really matters.

I think what would be another good idea would be to get an economical motherboard for now (by this I mean still a really good quality motherboard but one not necesserily packed with a lot of onboard features) and then wait for the next dual channel DDR chipset and then spend the bucks on that. I had wanted a granite bay mobo for my setup really bad but I got really tired of waiting for the boards to become available and also realized that the performance of the Granite Bay chipset is not really that much better than the 845PE chipset in real life benchmarks like games. I am HOPING that the next dual channel DDR Intel chipset will actually increase the performance of real life applications by more than 2%-3% than a 845PE chipset. Since the memory becomes the bottleneck for a 845PE system since the memory speed can't match the FSB speed, you would have thought that a dual channel chipset would give CONSIDERABLE gains (and not 2%-3%) by removing this bottleneck. This is currently NOT the case with the Granite Bay chipset. It gives you the numbers you would expect in Sandra but not in games.

You see, my only problem with the 845PE chipset is that the memory becomes a bottleneck at high FSB speeds. At my current 175Mhz FSB, the actual bus speed becomes 701Mhz (175x4) which is great but my PC3500 memory running at 219Mhz only makes up 219x2=438Mhz so there is a big gap between 701Mhz and 438Mhz. Therefore, IF you decide to go with a 845PE board like I did, my advice to you would be to get the fastest RAM you can get for that rig. I am saying this because I realized that you listed the fastest of everything for your setup except the RAM. DDR400 RAM is PC3200 RAM. That's not the fastest. PC3500 RAM runs at 433Mhz which is faster. You could of course get lower rated RAM and try to overclock it but then you could do the same with other components like the CPU too. Since you listed the fastest of every component on the market right now to buy, I figured you might want to get the fastest RAM too. Besides, buying fast RAM right now can REALLY be an investment merely because the next Intel CPU's will be running on a 800Mhz bus (200Mhz actual which makes 800Mhz with P4's quad pumped bus) and by that time DDR400 will become the standard and so you will be able to get 2 sticks of DDR400 in a dual channel DDR mobo to match the 800Mhz FSB of the CPU. This is why I bought 2 sticks of PC3500 memory right now. It is rated at 433Mhz so I will still have at least 33Mhz's of overhead with it in the future when I put in a dual channel mobo to go along with a 800Mhz FSB chip.

For the 845PE boards, Other than my ABit board, the motherboards I heard good things for overclocking are Albatron boards. You might want to take a look into that. There is also a review of an IWIll motherboard on this webpage which was able to reach 200+ FSB with an unlocked CPU so that might be another option. The thing is, I don't remember if that motherboard gave you good voltage options to play with so if not, you might end up having to do some hardware mods. the P4PE seems to be somewhat of a crapshoot as a lot of people are writing about the voltage instabilities with that motherboard.