OK, I've been shopping around for motherboards lately with the 875p chipset. So far I've come across a couple of choices from some manufactures I'm unsure of, but with most manufacturers it always comes down to some sacrifice I don't want to make. These are the features I'm looking for:
P4 3.0C + support
Good overclocking/overvolting options (FSB/RAM o/c with AGP/PCI lock)
875p chipset - 4GB ECC Unbuffered RAM
Integrated Intel Gigabit Northbridge Ethernet with CSA (Dual if possible)
Integrated ICH5-R SATA Southbridge RAID
1 8x AGP Pro slot
5 or 6 PCI slots (atleast 2 64bit or better if possible)
plus all the usuals like a good BIOS, Comprehensive monitoring, USB 2.0 ports, Infrared port, firewire, parallel, serial etc...
So far the boards I'm considering are the Intel D875PBZ, MSI NEO FIS2R, DFI LANPARTY PRO875, ASUS P4C400 and the SOYO SY-p4I875P Dragon 2 Platinum. The down side to these boards is that most don't have AGP Pro slots, or are missing overclocking features, or Intel CSA Gb lan, or ICH-R SATA RAID. Normally in this situation I'd just go to ASUS and buy their top end board, but this time around they're really dropped the ball in not including Intel CSA LAN and ICH-R SATA RAID, in favor of boosting their "Ai enabled" hype. I looked at some Supermicro boards but as usually something was missing... any kind of AGP slot. I know you're wondering why I'd even bother with o/c options with ECC RAM, and I'd have to answer that by saying that eventually I'll end up o/cing to squeeze some performance out of it in the future, although I'd compromise on this in favor of the other options.
The Gigabyte GA-8KNXP Ultra would be good, except I don't want to be paying for an integrated U320 Controller.
Right now I'm looking for a workstation board/high end consumer board since those are the ones which will most likely have AGP Pro/ECC/64bit PCI/Gb CSA LAN, however they always seem to leave out obvious things like AGP slots, PCI slots (in favor of ISA) and other things I'd rather not exclude.
875p is probably necessary since other workstation chips don't support anything but 12GB of DDR200 RAM, which I don't need Most likely, I'll be using 1GB (and eventually 3GB) Micron Crucial DDR400 ECC 512 sticks as RAM (later with two other 1GB sticks).
Does anyone have any suggestions?
P4 3.0C + support
Good overclocking/overvolting options (FSB/RAM o/c with AGP/PCI lock)
875p chipset - 4GB ECC Unbuffered RAM
Integrated Intel Gigabit Northbridge Ethernet with CSA (Dual if possible)
Integrated ICH5-R SATA Southbridge RAID
1 8x AGP Pro slot
5 or 6 PCI slots (atleast 2 64bit or better if possible)
plus all the usuals like a good BIOS, Comprehensive monitoring, USB 2.0 ports, Infrared port, firewire, parallel, serial etc...
So far the boards I'm considering are the Intel D875PBZ, MSI NEO FIS2R, DFI LANPARTY PRO875, ASUS P4C400 and the SOYO SY-p4I875P Dragon 2 Platinum. The down side to these boards is that most don't have AGP Pro slots, or are missing overclocking features, or Intel CSA Gb lan, or ICH-R SATA RAID. Normally in this situation I'd just go to ASUS and buy their top end board, but this time around they're really dropped the ball in not including Intel CSA LAN and ICH-R SATA RAID, in favor of boosting their "Ai enabled" hype. I looked at some Supermicro boards but as usually something was missing... any kind of AGP slot. I know you're wondering why I'd even bother with o/c options with ECC RAM, and I'd have to answer that by saying that eventually I'll end up o/cing to squeeze some performance out of it in the future, although I'd compromise on this in favor of the other options.
The Gigabyte GA-8KNXP Ultra would be good, except I don't want to be paying for an integrated U320 Controller.
Right now I'm looking for a workstation board/high end consumer board since those are the ones which will most likely have AGP Pro/ECC/64bit PCI/Gb CSA LAN, however they always seem to leave out obvious things like AGP slots, PCI slots (in favor of ISA) and other things I'd rather not exclude.
875p is probably necessary since other workstation chips don't support anything but 12GB of DDR200 RAM, which I don't need Most likely, I'll be using 1GB (and eventually 3GB) Micron Crucial DDR400 ECC 512 sticks as RAM (later with two other 1GB sticks).
Does anyone have any suggestions?
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