looking for suggestions on motherboard

hi, seeing as i dont see a overall system board forum and its split up i wanted to ask whats best out there?

my biggest beef is wondering should i go with amd or intel. i DO want an epox board though, ive always used asus and dug the athlon xp system(epox board) i built for my bro.

who doesnt like the 533 front side bus over the amd 333? im curious as to the pros and cons

i heard good things about the nforce chipset and heard nada about the 845G.

the EP4G4A+ intel based board and the 8RDA+ board are the 2 im looking at. theyre basically the same price at newegg as well.

comments appreciated too. im gonna need a whole slew of stuff like a new vid card, TI 42-4600 possibly, new sound card, etc. i have that squared away though. thanks

SD

Well, I can comment on the Intel board for you as I use the EPOX 4g4a in my system.

If you are not looking to overclock, the board is great for the cost. I have not had any stability issues with the board at all. Everything works fine and I am currently running my system in Dual channel mode at 150FSB.

The only problem with this board is it only officially supports DDR200 (PC1600) and DDR266(PC2100). (Its the 845G chip that limits the support.) Maybe due to the video intregration you get with it. There is no dividers to let you hit anything stable above DDR300 ish.

So, if you just want a good realiable board, it will work. If you want something to tweak your system to the max, you will want to look for a 845PE or new 875P chip based board.

If you want SC DDR, forget 845G based boards. 845PE is where its at. There are many good ones available from Asus, EPoX, Albatron, Abit. It depends on what features you want.

If you want to go DC DDR, the i875 "Canterwood" boards just came out and are very nice.

I would drop that 8RDA+ unless you want to mod it too death...the 8RGA+ is what you are looking for with the Epox NF2 boards...Also...the ATI 9500 Pro's are a much better card...and it is possible to make the 9500 pro into a working 9700 Pro ...

Here's a question to you...what do you plan on using your system for mainly?...that will depend if either Intel or AMD is more for your computing needs...

It's a good time, if you can wait a couple weeks. Canterwood or the newer 845PE for the P4. Or the newer revisions of the nforce 2. Abit's new rev 2.0 of the nforce looks promising--finally for nforce 2.
Canterwood will be expensive ($200+) for a long time, but it's going to rock. But the newer 845PE's, by Abit and Albatron and probably others to follow, will support the new 800Mhz P4. These 845Pe's are going for starting at $85.
Reviews so far are really showing all 3 close to equal in everything, using non-biased benchmarks. The only thing Canterwood is killing the others in is Sandra memory scores, but the more real benchmarks are not showing that extra bandwidth as adding anything beneficial other than bragging rights.