P4C800-E deluxe worth the price?

Ok guys I tried to make up my mind but i keep going back and forth between a few different choices.

I recently recieved a 3.0C P4 and I now need to upgrade the motherboard in my system inorder to use the 800 fsb. Memory is 2x256 Mushkin 400Mhz (2-2-2-4) DDR. The CPU will be watercooled by use of a swiftech water block and fairly large radiator. I been very happy with my Asus P4PE so I'm leaning more towards an Asus board unless there is a clearly better solution.

I should note that I've been going 1 to 2 years (max) between my CPU/Mobo/Memory upgrades. I do plan on overclocking this mutha as much as possible.

The most obvious solution is the P4C800-E Deluxe but I'm not sure that i need something that much and the price is relatively high (around $196 at newegg after tax).
It has the intel CSA gigabit lan which I will probably never take advantage of.
Serial ATA Raid but my WD 80GB SE is working just fine and if i do upgrade my hard drive I'm not likely to setup a raid array.
Firewire but I already have a USB2/Firewire Card and 3.5" access.
It seems that this board is also the fastest in terms of memory bandwith but the benchmarks are so close between the best the 875 and the better 865 with PAT that I'm not sure that such a small speed increase is a good reason to base my decision.

I'm torn between paying the premium for this board or saving my money and getting the standard P4P800. Sure it would be slightly slower and i wouldn't get the features that i listed but they seem waisted on me.

Then of course there's the P4C800, and the P4P800 deluxe.
Which would you guys suggest?

I have the p4c800-e.

I haven't used it yet, I need some new ram. (I still have pc133)
but i think it's a worth while board.

If your going budget on a 3.0C then the ABIT IS7 is a damn fine board esp since you won't need dividers. I HIGHLY recommend running a RAID0 array as your HD is by far the biggest bottleneck in day to day performance.

Found a way to get the the P4C800-E for $178.39 including tax and shipping. Now I'm seriously considering it. Only problem is I can get the P4P800 for $105.39.

The IS7 looks like a nice board similar performance and price to the P4P800. It has firewire but no gigabit lan and I like the fact that the P4P800 has Soundmax audio built in as i don't have a seperate audio card.

Having both the P4C800-E Deluxe and the P4P800, I would not buy the P4C800-E Deluxe again. It's a great board, no doubt. But there's no noticeable difference in performance in day to day activities, not that I was expecting any when I bought it anyway. Naturally, I do enjoy the bragging rights of saying I have a P4C800-E Deluxe in my main rig though. But I'll never spend $80 more on a board just for 1% more performance in benchmarks only.

I have a p4p800 dlx and love it. But don't let the onboard lan influence you too much. FWIW I recently put my old lan card back in and disabled the onboard...Noticable performance increase.

I thankyou all for your help and I think that I've made up my mind. Because the difference is only ~$70 I'm going to get the P4C800-E mainly for the ICH5R. I was hoping that i could add some of those options later but Kyles review (hardocp) of the original P4C800 & P4P800-Deluxe dissuaded me from that train of thought as he bashed both boards for their SATA raid 0 performance and cpu utilization with the Via and Promise controlers that those boards use. It's not something that i plan on using right now but I don't want the shoot myself in the foot trying to save some $$$. Besides the 1% speed increase and CSA should help me get more frags right? JK.

Grandpa Dan if what you says is true I'm alittle conserned about the onboad lan now. Did you notice an a decrease in CPU utilization or better ping?

EDIT:

Ok I'm confused again, the P4C800-E has both the promise and Intel SATA raid controlers built in?

The p4p800 dlx has both the intel and the via raid.

I don't know how to best explain the lan issues. They were inconsistent and quirky to say the least. What I do know is that when I put my $20.00 card back in suddenly no more glitches, quirks, or burps. Downloads are faster and my sandra scores improved.

Deptmaster said:

Found a way to get the the P4C800-E for $178.39 including tax and shipping. Now I'm seriously considering it. Only problem is I can get the P4P800 for $105.39.

The IS7 looks like a nice board similar performance and price to the P4P800. It has firewire but no gigabit lan and I like the fact that the P4P800 has Soundmax audio built in as i don't have a seperate audio card.

Click to expand...

My IS7 came with a built-in Broadcom gigabit LAN controller, even though the official specs says 10/100 only. I think if you ask on the Abit forum, a lot of people will tell you the IS7 they got came with gigabit LAN too.

I built one for a friend and the GIGABIT LAN worked on hers too.

Deptmaster said:

Found a way to get the the P4C800-E for $178.39 including tax and shipping. Now I'm seriously considering it. Only problem is I can get the P4P800 for $105.39.

Click to expand...

Can you say where you got these prices from?

I have one P4C800-E Deluxe. See my sig for details.

It's all the matter of your budget. I see lots of people with cheaper P4p800 or other boards are doing just fine on overclocking and some other things. Not much reason for me to choose this board besides PAT, I just wanted the best. So when I saw it's the highest one listed as $200+ at newegg, there we go..

slkcrab -I don't have a problem telling you but I don't think you'l have much use for the info.
I work for a major online/retail computer store that most people (including myself) wouldn't expect to carry Asus Motherboards albeit at MSRP but with my employee discount i can get the prices mentioned above.
Kinda crappy if you ask me I work for them but I'm only going to save ~$18 on the P4C800-E compaired to ordering through newegg and it's not even instock right now so I might still go that route.

Well I got tired of waiting for the P4C800-E so i went ahead and ordered the P4P800 non deluxe. I didn't realize that it also has the ICH5R; the poor raid performance that Kyle at hardocp was talking about must have been through the VIA controller on the deluxe board and that only applies to IDE RAID which i have no intention using.
No going back now.

deluxe has ich5r, non duluxe has only ich5

My P4P800 has ICH5R. The non deluxe P4C800s had ICH5 only.

As you can see from my sig i am using a p4c800e deluxe and i can thoroughly recommend the board, very fast and also stable.

You should seriously consider using raid on this board though as it really flies. If you don't need the Intel SATA or CSA Gigabit LAN i would save the money and get the P4P. No use in paying for things you won't use, and if you're using air to overclock that 3.0c then you probably won't see any change in your overclock between the P4C and P4P.

I do plan on setting up a raid eventually just not with standard ide hard drives as my next hard drive will most assuredly be SATA and according to all the reviews the specs I've seen P4P800 non deluxe does have the ICH5R with SATA raid support.

CSA would be nice but i doubt I would ever see the benefit.

marscay - This is going in my water-cooled box including the swiftech MCW462-U, dual 120mm fan radiator, and Eheim 1048 pump. The CPU is the only part being water-cooled.

I should be getting the P4P800 sometime next week. Tried to get my boss to ship it next day air or overnight but I can't argue with free ups ground.

Performance problem with onboard LAN/RAID

The performance/stability issues you guys saw with onboard LAN and RAID performance was due to the RAID chip and LAN being on the PCI bus.

With the P4C800-E Deluxe, the ICH5R chip talks directly to the processor, so if you're using SATA RAID by connecting your dirves to the SATA1 and SATA2 connections, you won't be using the PCI bus.
The onboard Promise controller that allows for ATA RAID, as well as RAID with the other 2 SATA connectors uses the PCI bus.

The onboard LAN on the P4C800-E Dlx uses CSA GigaLAN - which bypasses the PCI bus. The old 3COM GigaLAN used the PCI bus.

Read here for more info:

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1851

Thanks Brad thats what i thought.