In an earlier post i was asking about whether now was a good time to buy an 845PE board, well due to my limited funds i have no choice but to go with an 845PE, much as i would like to go the E7205 or i875P route. I've managed to narrow my choices down to 2 boards, the Gigabyte GA-8PE800 Ultra or the Abit BE7 RAID. I was looking at the BH7 but the lack of onboard features and the well documented CPU temperature reading problem finally lead to me crossing it off my list. Besides which, i'm not looking to overclock to monumental speeds due to only having DDR333, and neither dimm are anything special (winbond and kingston CL2.5 rated), so i'll be happy to get my 2.53ghz P4 to 3ghz (158 fsb i think) with the ram set to 1:1 ratio.
The GA-8PE800 Ultra is actually cheaper than the 8PE667 Ultra board ($209 Canadian for the 800 vs $219 Canadian for the 667) but the BE7 RAID board is cheaper still ($179 Canadian), but is missing a couple of features (onboard SATA and IEEE 1394 headers, would be nice but i'm not sure i would actually use them). I'm assuming the Abit board will allow for a better overclock, but seeing as my overclocking goals are quite modest, i don't know if that is going to make much difference. I'm also a little worried about the CPU temperature readings on the BE7 series, do they have the same problem as the BH7? The last thing i want is to have the temperature read incorrectly and i end up frying my cpu as a result. Any info on this would be greatly appreciated. So, basically i'm asking anyone who has any experience with either of these boards, would you recommend it, and which of the two is the better value?
Thanks in advance....
The GA-8PE800 Ultra is actually cheaper than the 8PE667 Ultra board ($209 Canadian for the 800 vs $219 Canadian for the 667) but the BE7 RAID board is cheaper still ($179 Canadian), but is missing a couple of features (onboard SATA and IEEE 1394 headers, would be nice but i'm not sure i would actually use them). I'm assuming the Abit board will allow for a better overclock, but seeing as my overclocking goals are quite modest, i don't know if that is going to make much difference. I'm also a little worried about the CPU temperature readings on the BE7 series, do they have the same problem as the BH7? The last thing i want is to have the temperature read incorrectly and i end up frying my cpu as a result. Any info on this would be greatly appreciated. So, basically i'm asking anyone who has any experience with either of these boards, would you recommend it, and which of the two is the better value?
Thanks in advance....
