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Best motherboard for stability with LOTS of peripherals

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docinthebox

Member
Joined
Jan 18, 2003
Location
Sunnyvale, California
I'm looking for a board that's stable even with lots of peripherals. I have a GF4 AGP 8x card, Hauppauge TV tuner card, Audigy2, Highpoint RocketRAID 404, LSI Logic 21320 SCSI card, 7 hard drives (1 SCSI, 6 IDE), 1 CDRW, 1 DVD, 1 DVD+RW. This is in addition to any built-in peripheral onboard like LAN controller, firewire, USB controller.

Right now, I just finished plugging everything onto an Abit IS7 and it's not working very well. Lots of conflicts.

I understand that part of the stability has to do with the firmware and driver implementation of the individual peripherals. But I'm sure the motherboard implementation (e.g. of the PCI bus/slots) is also critical in determining overall stability.

Does anyone have any recommendation in this regard?

I'm considering the following boards and any other you can think of:

1. Abit IC7
2. Asus P4P800
3. Asus P4C800-E
4. Supermicro I865 or I875 based board (considering this since Supermicro has a strong reputation on building server boards where you likely have lots of peripherals and where stability is the primary concern.)

Thanks for any input/recommendation.
 
The IC7 is basically the same as the IS7 except it uses higher quality chips, so the conflicts will be the same. I say work out the conflicts with what you have. Start with a basic rig with only a vid card and one harddrive and then add components one at a time until you figure out the problem. I don't for the life of me understand why you need the SCSI card and drive when you have SATA and RAID. Make sure you disable the onboard sound in the BIOS and any other features you're not using.
 
Thanks for the advice, batboy. That's what I'm going to do next, before buying a new board. But I'm worried that there's only so much shuffling you can do with PCI cards/slots since I'm using 4 out of the 5 PCI slots available.

I'm using SCSI even when I have SATA and RAID because my SCSI drive is a Seagate Cheetah 15k.3 with a very fast access time. AFAIK, the SATA drive with the fastest access time is the WD Raptor but even that only runs at 10k rpm. On the other hand, RAID/striping improves throughput only, not access time. A drive with fast access time is beneficial when one does a lot of random access like running a database, which I intend to do. (I work on Oracle at work.)
 
One of the most stable and feature rich boards that I've ever seen is the Gigabyte 8KNXP. Not the best board for overclocking, but stable as a rock and has tons of features. It will handel 12 drives in all. 2 on sata raid ICHR, 2 sata raid SI, 4 IDE raid, and 4 on a IDE non-raid controller. It sells for around $210. There's also a ultra version that has a U320 SCSI controller instead of the IDE raid. It sells for about $370. Its little brother the 8iK1100 sells for about $140, but lacks the SI sata controller and the IDE raid controller.
 
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