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Buying new mainboards for work? Room to grow?

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Chaiyz

Member
Joined
Jan 5, 2008
Location
Gainesville, Florida Go Gators!!!
I have a side job at a local print/sign shop administering their network. The place is pretty old, everything was P2 when I first started and I have been upgrading pieces here and there to newer technology. Now the shops main sign rig's need to be replaced and I have alot of good parts to work with.
On hand:
3 P4 D630's with zalman's
4- 1g PC6400's
3- ATI HD2650's
6-500G Sata2 3.0's

I'm looking for mainboards, must be fast sata, must be pciex16, ddr2 and work with pent. D's.

I'd love to buy 3 Asus P5Q deluxe's but the boss doesn't want to shell out that much money.

What are your suggestions?
I'm needing something in the under $50 range and a place to get them. Sorry if I've not given more info, The current sign machines are both AMD sempron 3000's, SATA and DDR400 tiger direct last year for $100 each without harddrives. The sign computers are not very quick at all and since I have decent parts laying around, I'd like to get them moving along a bit better.

Thanks,
Chaiyz
 
I've found these ESC boards online at: http://www.ascendtech.us/itemdesc.asp?ic=MB4ECS945PLA755 or http://www.ascendtech.us/itemdesc.asp?ic=MB4ASUSP5GD2VM

I know I'm asking alot for for very little but that asus board also has gigabit lan. I'm wanting the cheapest solution with newest technologies that can be grown to fit the companies needs. I'm only expecting to get 1 year out of these machines and want to have parts minus mb,processor to build new rigs. Adding better quality ram during this year. It's all relative. I'm finding good things on pricewatch but seem to be missing a place that has the ability to check off technologies and get a list. Like I said, I want something that will do P4 d's, SATA2, PCIEx16, DDR2 at least 800 and would also like gigabit lan. I forgot to mention that I won't be OC'ing these computers. Just need reliable quick workstations that will be running XP professional, running corel draw 12, CS3 and Flexisign

Thanks,

Chaiyz
 
Last edited:
Please people. I need some input. I did order the ESC board, I realized later that the ASUS didn't meet my parts list but now I'm realizinpg that the ESC board has the p45 chipset and I have some good zalman coolers. Maybe I will try to push the trusty old D630 a bit. I know these things get hot. I've had several prescott machines but never an ESC board, I've always been an ABIT,ASUS guy.....
Chaiyz
 
Please people. I need some input. I did order the ESC board, I realized later that the ASUS didn't meet my parts list but now I'm realizinpg that the ESC board has the p45 chipset
Chaiyz
I hope you mean the 945 chipset board. I don't think a P4 cpu will work in a P45 board.
 
Yep. Sorry, I did mean 945 chipset. I ordered these boards and they should be in tomarrow. I've spoken with the boss and since the network is growing, the tech is moving forward and some of the systems are still very old, after building these 3 systems, one of them is going to get an old X300 vid card and operate as both a new POS(point of sale) and be the NAS box. The whole system really needs a huge upgrade but everything is relative due to an old, OLD, splash print server on the main color machine. I believe it's actually a 300mhz G3 mac and it's talking to the network via appletalk which is really causing issues with speed over the network. The owner already has a good zerox machine with Fiery but the system running on the splash is the main workhorse color machine which does not have a service per tick contract and it's not cost feasible at this point in time to change it. I'm sure this system could be upgraded to the existing fiery but I don't have the first clue as to how to do it.
Since the whole right now hinges on the old splash I'm just currently working on getting all the client machines up to date with a couple of graphic machines and getting the backbone of the network moved over to gigabit. I've recently converted a few routers in the office to DD-WRT and am also playing with routing options to maybe improve speed to the splash but this is relatively new to me so it's just a project right now.

Thanks for the info and anyone understanding what I'm trying to do with advice would be greatly appreciated.

Chaiyz
 
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