asus p4p800 or abit IS7

I currently have a th7ii and want to get a springdale board. I was going to buy the p4p800 deluxe but then I saw that abit has enabled "pat" (or something comparable to it anyway) on their board as well, both use ich5r and i think the abit board is a little less money, anyone have any idea which one would be the better overclocker?

Current tests and reviews favor either board. I have the P4P800 Deluxe and I have no problems with it using a 2.4C. I may pick up an IS7-G to play with.

I have an IS7 I picked up for $107 shipped. Runs great, no problems at all. Has SATA RAID, Firewire, USB 2.0, etc. A great value for that low price. I'm running a P4 2.6C @ 3.3 GHz with Corsair PC3200 XMS DDR with the core set at 1.6V (1.55V according to MBM).

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1831

Has a good comparison of 875/865 motherboards.

I too am having trouble deciding whether to get an ABIT board or an ASUS board. Generally I prefer the ABIT boards, but I'm wondering if I should get an ASUS this time as I've read of a lot more problems with the ABIT boards on here. Especially with Memory problems ?

I know they've sorted a lot of these problems out lately, but if you look at the Anadtech comparison of the IC7, IC7-G, P4P800 and P4C800 the ASUS boards pass all tests with all of the RAM no problems, where as the ABIT boards have to have some of the different memory brands settings altered/slowed down to pass the tests, that makes me wonder about the latest ABIT boards?

(I'm currently running an ABIT BD7, which is a great board, although I do admit, it's 'very' fussy about which RAM it will run)

I have good Samsung RAM at the moment, and I don't particularly want to have to go out and buy more ram just because the ABIT doesn't like it (hopefully I wouldn't have to though)

Just some thoughts..

I'll clear this up for you guys.If your not going to overclock then the IS7 is the fastest for now at default speeds.If your going to overclock the P4P800 is the choice to go with.
Review IS7

Benchmarks also show this to be the fastest 865/875 board at DEFAULT settings due to some pretty slick BIOS optimizations Abit has added beginning with the Beta3 BIOS. At higher overclocks, I did NOT find the same killer performance with the IS7, but it is certainly the performance equal of any current 865/875 on the market. An incredible board - particularly at its price point.

My only reservation is the IS7 with either Beta3 or the just released Beta4 is not as stable as the best of the 875 and 865 boards. I fully expect Abit will fix this, and the Beta4 shows progress in that direction. If the release BIOS is as stable as the IC7 has become with the Performance we see with the Beta4 BIOS, then nothing will come close to the IS7.

If there's one thing I can't stand on motherboards as of late -- it's the proliferation of these vestigial fans on the northbridge heatsinks. A manufacturer puts some cheap low profile, small surface area heatsink on the northbridge, then slaps on a high RPM noisy fan that goes bad after six months and gets noisier in the process . . . . when all the northbridge needed in the first place was a decent heatsink without the added moving parts of a fan. I'm glad Asus at least get this right. Buying Asus lately reduces the cost of ownership for me, as I always modify my northbridge to passive cooling, so getting it that way by default is super fine. What's more, the presence or non-presence of a fan on the northbridge heatsink doesn't seem to be a large factor in how far people can overclock. For most people, most of the time -- the overclocking bottleneck lies elsewhere than the temperature of the northbridge.

/digress

pick asus

the ASUS p4p800's PAT/MAM only works when ram is run at 1:1 syncrounsly... correct me if I'm wrong?

Shook said:

the ASUS p4p800's PAT/MAM only works when ram is run at 1:1 syncrounsly... correct me if I'm wrong?

Click to expand...

I'm running at 5:4 (260 fsb/209 mem) and I have MAM on. I did some Sandra tests before and after and I get about 500mbp/s more with MAM on.

As far as what motherboard to go with, I chose Asus for a couple of reasons. I remembered them from ~10 yrs ago and they're still around. I read posts from a LOT of different forums to see what the users thought, not reviewers and I've seen much less reported problems/*******/moans from Asus owners than I did from the Abit owners.

I did have a slight problem with flashing the bios of my P4P800 (non-deluxe) when I first got it and had to RMA it back but I replaced it with a deluxe and the flash went perfectly. I'm very happy with my board.

-Bobby

Anymore opinions of the abit and asus springdale owners? I'm still trying to decide on which board to get.

According to what I've read the IS7 is a great all around board for stock and overclock speeds, beats the P4P800.

But, if you are planning to do some heavy overclocking maybe beyond a 250 fsb or so, the IS7 laggs behind its canterwood counterpart the IC7, maybe because of the hardware limitations or some say because Abit needs to make a better BIOS, which some believe that they will.

I had a IS-7 that was crap. Could not overclock much at all.

Not stable at all. Not even at 220-230 FSB.
And the bios were not ready (though very easy to work with) . I could not even change my latencys. It changed them back all the time.

Now with Gigabyte everything is better.

I think having luck and getting a good Northbridge chipset is a critical factor. If you check different reviews the max FSB overclock changes a lot between different boards and reviews.