Exaustive Motherboard Search

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?

Sounds like you are wanting the Abit IC7-G AdvanceII , if you havent looked at it check it out.

Tread

tread70 said:

Sounds like you are wanting the Abit IC7-G AdvanceII , if you havent looked at it check it out.

Tread

Click to expand...

Damn, that might be the one.

It looks like 64bit PCI isn't going to happen since the 875p chipset doesn't support it. I guess anything else I can look for is 6 PCI which would be perfect, and dual ethernet (one GbLAN/one FastLAN) would be the icing, though I think I'm running out of mobo manufacturers.

What would you need 6 pci slots for on a motherboard? Sound,modem(maybe),extra USB, I really cant see where anyone will need that many pci slots with the great features on new motherboards. I hope you can make up your mind, the Abit is a great board for OC'ing aswell as feature rich.

Tread

PS: If you want dual ethernet then just add an extra pci card, I dont think you could fill them up. I mean it has 5 pci's how many extra cards will you have in the slots?

I have 2 SCSI controllers, a sound card, a DVD decoder TV out card, will have a "video editing/TV tuner card" and an AGP Pro card which will block the first PCI slot. I guess I could drop the DVD decoder, which would be a waste, but I guess they like to make it so I can't have everything... unless I have 2 computers running here

The second ethernet isn't that necessary... i'll just run through a hub... It would be great if they made AGP cards with wider HSFs instead of taller though...

Abit does space the first pci slot away from the agp but it may still block the air movement from the video card. You could get the AIW ATI card that has the basic same features as the DVD decoder but I am not that experienced in that feild so I may be wrong. Two SCSI cards? I assume you are wanting SCSI Raid? Which can be done with one card but will cost considerably more. Its really all in what you want and how much money you have to spend.

Tread

I've got an older U160 card (Doesn't have RAID) right now which has a 10k drive and other SCSI devices attached to it, as well as a U320 Card (Does have RAID) which will be running RAID 0 soon with 2 other drives. I plan to move the 10k drive there too with another 10k drive and run RAID 0 on that as well. Kind of a bummer that with all those drives and other cards it'll max out the PCI BUS quite often.

The Sigma XCard DVD Decoder has extremely good image quality and mpeg-4/2/1 hardware decoding. I also have software to remove region coding, macrovision, and user prohibitions. It's also much simpler to use and to output to TV than what I remember from previous TV out cards I've owned before. If I didn't have this card I'd have to go out and get a modified DVD player anyway...

The card I was planning to get was an ATI Fire GL 256MB, which is AGP Pro and takes up 2 slots, though, right now I'm looking at other cards like the Quadro FX 1000, Matrox, and Oxygen.

At any rate, the IC7-G Max2 Advance is better than anything out there. Thanks for pointing it out.