What holds the best possibilities?

It's the same old story, I'm building a new rig, and I want to overclock it, but I don't know what format/motherboard hold the greatest possibilities. I have heard (actually read, on THG) that when greatly overclocked, say, 2.8 -3 GHz, DDR loses it's efficiency, and RDRAM is the only way P4s can maintain a very high performance benefit. However, I have also heard that RDRam is a very finicky overclocker. I have narrowed my search down (perhaps wrongly, please let me know) to the Gigabyte 8IRXP and the Abit TH7-II. I don't really want to wait for 133 MHz FSB to come around, so if you guys could recommend alternatives, give advice on the RD-RAM vs. DDR-Ram issue, and maybe share experiences/achievements with either of these motherboards, I would be much obliged.

I have heard many good things about the Abit TH7II-Raid. Abit is a solid company and from what I have read, the Abit TH7II has some nice bios options. I just purchased an Abit TH7II-Raid, pc800 double sided Samsung rdram, and Intel p4 1.8a GHz and after doing some research I think this is the best combo, i'll post my results.
Also, I would not take Toms Hardware too seriously (example: Tom gets the p4 over 3GHz with gigabyte board so go and buy that board) because you have to remember that he probably has 50 boards to choose from and just uses one that will get the job done, not worrying about being upgradable or the features really. Get the board that has the features you want, I think the Abit board is solid and seems to have some nice options while the gigabyte board is still probably good, but no agp/pci fix.
As far as memory, I don't see why you shouldn't go with rdram. Rdram is faster and has more bandwidth than DDR. I would go with the rdram and if you get lucky, you will be able to easily overclock your processor without having much problems, otherwise you may have to put in a fan to cool the memory. Whats the point in having a high processor frequency when many times the DDR can't keep up. Well, there are advantages but I can't seem to find a reason to buy DDR when you can buy RDRAM which is faster and is the same price.

Yeh for raw over clockability, go for some nice pc2700 ddr, for the motherboard i'd highly suggest the Asus p4b266, it's a very nice board for overclocking the northwoods, i've seen it handle some high fsbs. RDRAM(thoughts being beaten recently) does have it's advantages, but it really doesn't overclock well, well except for those select few that voltage modded it, but besides that it really doesnt bring much in the department of overclocking.

amd_builder said:

I have heard many good things about the Abit TH7II-Raid. Abit is a solid company and from what I have read, the Abit TH7II has some nice bios options. I just purchased an Abit TH7II-Raid, pc800 double sided Samsung rdram, and Intel p4 1.8a GHz and after doing some research I think this is the best combo

Click to expand...

I am looking to get the same setup but was told to get the Samsung Rambus that has 8 chips and not 4 on them. Where did you get your Rambus and do you know if it will OC well, did someone tell you that these specific chips work well

[qb]Originally posted by Revx
Yeh for raw over clockability, go for some nice pc2700 ddr, for the motherboard i'd highly suggest the Asus p4b266, it's a very nice board for overclocking the northwoods, i've seen it handle some high fsbs. RDRAM(thoughts being beaten recently) does have it's advantages, but it really doesn't overclock well, well except for those select few that voltage modded it, but besides that it really doesnt bring much in the department of overclocking.[/qb]

Click to expand...

I heard the same thing about the Asus board but the Raid board is impossible to find ...... I wish I could but I can not

How can you say that the Rambus combos are not OC well. The OC databases I have seen have shown that the TH7 2 and Rambus OC very well and most of the results have been from non modified boards

Yeh lol, those people have done vmem voltage mods(upping the ram voltage), i can gurantee you that if you just stick an rdram chip in the board with a northwood, you mostlikely wont get higher than 115mhz fsb, and as for raid, why not just get a pci card, it's not as if it's that big of a deal.

Revx said:

i can gurantee you that if you just stick an rdram chip in the board with a northwood, you mostlikely wont get higher than 115mhz fsb, and as for raid, why not just get a pci card, it's not as if it's that big of a deal.

Click to expand...

you can't say something like that with no experiences of this, i can up my FSB to 120 with no problem, just need to up the Vcore voltage to 1.6V, no other mods, it takes a second. provided with good cooling can get to very high FSB's.

for the most parts its true, yes you probably can get 120 and possibly a bit higher, by itself, but you wont get the insane high over 200mhz fsb with rdram like you see on the overclocking databases without vmem mods, and that i can say

Revx said:

for the most parts its true, yes you probably can get 120 and possibly a bit higher, by itself, but you wont get the insane high over 200mhz fsb with rdram like you see on the overclocking databases without vmem mods, and that i can say

Click to expand...

I wasnt aware of this

Then ..... what performs better [faster] a Nortwood with Rdrm at 120 or a I845D with good DDR 333 at 180 or higher FSB which should be easy to get with Samsung DDR 333

From what i've seen, the ddr at around 200mhz can beat out the rdram in memory benchmarks, that and you get more raw cpu performance.