Best board for a P4 for average home user not OCer?

I'm building a system for a guy who insist's on an Intel system. I have never built a P4 system before so I'm a bit in the dark. I assuming a Socket 478 is the way to go, correct? Well what's a good model brandname board (not to high end) to get? He's not an overclocker or anything just an average home user. What's better RDram board or DDR board? I need to quote him a price for part's by tomorrow so he can cutt me a check.

Well your right in going Socket 478, Socket 423 was obsolete as soon as it was released. As for which memory type, it all depends on your budget and how much of a performance freak the person you are building the system for is. For all out P4 performance, the choice is simple, RDRAM. The P4 was built for RDRAM and until a dual channel DDR SDRAM board comes out, RDRAM is still the best solution for a P4. Now if your friend is on a budget, then go with DDR SDRAM. Though right now the price is about the same for both memory types, the difference between the boards is between $20 and $40USD.

My suggestions for P4 boards are:

RDRAM: Abit TH7II(RAID) - This is the board I'm getting for my P4 system - or the Asus P4T-E

DDR SDRAM: Gigabyte GA-8IRXP, Abit BD7-RAID, or the Asus P4B266

Good luck.

Thank's alot for the input. I greatly appreciate it!

A few question's yet though. Will the TH7II support CPU's smaller then the 1.7's? I'm planning on getting a 1.4 or 1.5 gig for him. Abit's website doesn't really specify. It just say's socket 478 cpu's.

get an intel-branded board


rock solid

Actually anything running the intel chipset which is what the 845 or 850 chipset is. Your going to get the same stability but with the added adjustment's and ability to tweak as well as OC.
And just about all of the Intel branded board's normally only have around 2 ram slot's. I would rather he have more, atleast 3 for upgrade purposes. That's the only problem I have with the Abit BD7.
The Asus P4B266 is what I was leaning toward's for DDR. Man $167.00 shipped is a lot though! Oh, well it's not my money! The Abit TH7II is actually cheaper then the PB5 266. But I need to know if it support's the 1.4 gig P4's first. If it does I think I'll go with the TH7II.

bdf24 said:

Thank's alot for the input. I greatly appreciate it!

A few question's yet though. Will the TH7II support CPU's smaller then the 1.7's? I'm planning on getting a 1.4 or 1.5 gig for him. Abit's website doesn't really specify. It just say's socket 478 cpu's.

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The Abit board should be able to work with all Socket 478 CPUs so you should be fine getting a 1.4 or 1.5GHz P4. I might suggest you look at the 1.6A P4 CPU which has the Northwood core. Intel usually prices their lower end CPU about the same so there should be little difference between a 1.5GHz P4 and a 1.6GHz NW P4.

BTW, if you get a NW make sure that the board is ready for the NW core. Some people have gotten boards with an older BIOS revision that has trouble detecting the NW cores correctly.

Edit: Forgot to add one more thing. If you go with the RDRAM solution, remember that for the i850 chipset motherboards, memory mush be installed in pairs or your system will not work, just in case you didn't know that already.

Enigma422 said:

Edit: Forgot to add one more thing. If you go with the RDRAM solution, remember that for the i850 chipset motherboards, memory mush be installed in pairs or your system will not work, just in case you didn't know that already.

Click to expand...

So I need to get two stick's of RDram and run them in pair's for the system to even work? One stick won't work?

bdf24 said:

So I need to get two stick's of RDram and run them in pair's for the system to even work? One stick won't work?

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Yes you do need two sticks of RDRAM of the same size for your system to work. What makes the Abit TH7II and any i850 based motherboard is that RDRAM uses a dual channel architechture to give it its theoretical 3.2GB/sec bandwidth. Each RIMM provides 1.6GB/sec X 2 channels gives you 3.2GB/sec for PC800 memory. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, this requires a minimum of two sticks of the same size, and preferably the same brand, in order for your system to work.

Remember too, if you use two sticks, then the remaining two sockets must be filled with continuity modules, provided with the motherboard. This is because RDRAM uses a serialized interface as opposed to a parallel interface like DDR SDRAM uses. All this should be explained in the manual of the motherboard. You might want to take a look at the pdf manual of the Abit TH7II available at Abit's website.

Ok thanks again.
So If I want to run 256 meg's of ram I need to buy two 256meg stick's of ram? Or will two 128's running in pair still give me 256 megs? Sorry if I'm asking so many question's. I've been away from intel for well over a year now and have'nt done any research on the new P4's or i850 board's. I'd look more stuff up myself but I'm pressed for time.

bdf24 said:

Ok thanks again.
So If I want to run 256 meg's of ram I need to buy two 256meg stick's of ram? Or will two 128's running in pair still give me 256 megs? Sorry if I'm asking so many question's. I've been away from intel for well over a year now and have'nt done any research on the new P4's or i850 board's. I'd look more stuff up myself but I'm pressed for time.

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It's okay, I havent had an Intel system myself since my PII 450 about 3 years ago. I've stuck with AMD since the K7s came out, but felt compeled to build a Intel system with because of the incredible overclocks the new Northwood cores have and just to diversify the types of systems I have in my network. Next up a Mac iBook

Anyway, to answer your question, to run 256MB of RAM you need two 128MB sticks. A simple formula to use, take the amount of memory you want to place in your system and divide it by 2 or 4, if you want to fill up all the RAM sockets, and that is the size of each stick you need to buy.

Ex: 512MB total system memory / 2 sticks of memory = 256MB or 512MB total system memory / 4 sticks of memory = 128MB

So you would need 2 sticks of 256MB RIMMs or 4 128MB RIMMs to run your system. Hope this explanation was helpful.

Thanks that does help.
If I want to run a total of 256 meg's of system ram, I need to get two 128 meg stick's. Well that's not so bad then.

Thank's alot.

Well I ended up getting him the Abit TH7-II, 1.6aP4 (northwood), and 2 - 128 meg stick's of Rdram. That should set him up pretty good.