Before you even consider which board you want to get, you much first figure out which kind of memory system you want for your Pentium 4 sysem. Right now there are three choices, one of which you must absolutely stay away from, SDRAM.
That leaves the other two choices, DDR and RDRAM.
DDR memory will give you better overclocking options without any complexity (My use of the word complexity will be explained shortly). This is because, as some of us may know from our Athlon systems, DDR handles higher clock speeds almost as well as SDRAM does, and since you can't change the multipliers on a P4, unless your one of the lucky few who own an ES sample, you will have to OC using your FSB. This in turn means OCing your memory. The drawback is that DDR does not provide enough bandwidth to satisfy a P4, especially the NW with their 512KB of L2 cache and will be a bottleneck in your system, especially when you start hitting speeds about 2.4GHz. But if CPU clock frequency is your thing, then go with a DDR solution, but you may sacrafice overall system performance for high clock speed. If you go with DDR there are several options you can go with. I personally would go with a motherboard with an i845D chipset such as the Abit BD7(RAID), Asus P4B266, or the Gigabyte GA-8IRXP.
RDRAM is the second memory type that is good for a P4 system, but overclocking with RDRAM is another story. RDRAM is sensitive to changes in FSB, but from what I heard, current yeilds of PC800 (400MHz FSB) RDRAM can hit PC1066 (533MHz FSB) as long as you have Samsung Original memory. This may limit your ability to OC a NW with RDRAM as anything above 133MHz(533MHz QDR) is up in the air. You have the option of lowering your RDRAM timings to 3x instead of the default 4x to achieve higher FSB, but that is an option that I personally would not want to sacrafice since the major selling point, and the major point I'm building a P4 system with RDRAM, is memory bandwidth to give an overall boast in system performance. Another complication of building an RDRAM system is the Direct Rambus Clock Generators (DRCGs). To get a good overclock with an RDRAM based system you need to have good DRCG chips on your board, particularly an ICS9212 -03 or -13 (preferebly) DRCG. These are the DRCGs that people you see hitting 133MHz (533MHz QDR FSB and PC1066 RDRAM) have on their boards. Of particular interest, and one of the hardest to find, are the ICS DRCGs ending with -13. These DRCGs are rated up to 600MHz (150MHz FSB, PC1200 RDRAM).
Now that I finished scaring you over the overclockability of an RDRAM based system
let me tell you the advantages of having RDRAM. First, Intel designed the P4 around RDRAM so it is still the best memory for all out P4 performance. It provides the most memory bandwidth that the P4s need, especially the NW with 512KB of L2 cache. Also, most of the new boards that support RDRAM come with an ICS DRCG so your overclocking options are still there, though you may not acheive as high a CPU clock speed as you would get with a DDR board, but overall you will increase your systems performance across the board, which means that the overall performance will increase in your system as opposed to only increasing the speed of your CPU. If you do choose to go with an RDRAM system, there is really only one choice. A motherboard based on the i850 chipset, and I would strongly suggest taking a look at the Abit TH7II(RAID) or the Asus P4T-E. Another pointer is to get Samsung Original RDRAM, 16 device for 256MB RIMMs and 8 device for 128MB RIMMs. Finally, incase you do not already know, RDRAM must be installed in pairs on your RDRAM system.
Consider your options carefully and what you really want out of your system, research your parts, talk to people you know personally and in forums and see what they say. As for me, I hope to have all the parts for my RDRAM based P4 system by the end of the week. Good luck in your project.
bdf24, glad to see some of my advice helped you out, let me how the system your building turns out.
