[Mastiff]

I'm about to build a new HTPC after having my current one around two years, which is a clear record for me. I bought good, fast hardware when I built it - a lot cheaper than getting cheap low-end stuff and having to upgrade after 6 months... I'm looking very hard at the Asus P4R800-V with AIT 9100 chipset, both because it seems to fit the bill for ffdshow (for those who do not know this is sort of an equalizer for your DVDs (well, for rips as well, but rips do not look good on a CRT projector with an more than 8 foot wide screen...)) (the things that are needed are dual channel memory support and a fast bus), because it's reasonably priced (around 120 dollars in Norway) and because I hope to be able to use the built-in 9100 graphics chip as a second graphics card along with my 9800 AIW. And then there's the P4C800, which doesn't have the ATI graphics card, but may be better to get a stable OC on. I'm considering using them together with a 3.0 gHz Prescott with 1 mb cache.

Will this be a good setup? I also hope to be able to overclock the CPU a bit. I know that with water cooling or other types of extreme cooling this processor can get up to 4 gig, but that's probably not possible to have stable since I'm planning to run it with air cooling (a very good Zalman cooler, but still...).

The wish is to be able to run Denoise 3D, dScaler Sharpen and resize (probably higher than my current 1024x768, which is my desktop size on the Barco Graphics 808). This is done barely with a clock speed of 3 gig, but I would like to be able to push up to around 3.5 if possible. The demand, and this is not an option, is 100 % stability. I have had this with my AMD XP2600/MSI KT-4 setup all along, so I won't settle for less. This is an always on computer (because it doubles as a whole house media server), so there's no way I'm gonna relax this demand.

Oh, then there's the possibility of using an Abit IC7 Max3 instead. How would that work in this competition?

Can somebody please tell me what I should do? If I'm able to run the P4 @ 3.5 with the ATI based board I will go for that. If not I will have to lean towards the i875 based board. Thanks in advance!

[ciku]

go for asus.. p4c800 dlx

[Mastiff]

So this will overclock well with a 3.0 Prescott and the Corsair TWINX512-4000 DDR-DIMM 512MB with two matched 256? I see you have got around 3.3 from a 2.4 with air cooling, so I could maybe be able to get 3.75 from the 3.0, or what? Again with total stability, of course...

[lyle]

If you plan on doing ANY overclocking, you must choose the i875 based board as the ATI based board has NO overclocking options.

There was a thread floating around here about someone trying to find an o'cing friendly BIOS for the P4R800-V, without much success.

[Mastiff]

Thanks, I have begun to understand that. So it's between the p4c800 and the IC7 Max3, I guess. For my use they have equal features. So the ultimate desicion lays in what card can get the highest clock stable (and I mean 100 % stable). I get that opinions differ, probably mostly based on what people have themselves and what brand they are fans of. And the tests seems to lean both ways, but then I have not yet seen a test that's based on running an overclocked system 24/7, which is what I will do. If one of them can do 3.75 stable with a 3.0 and air cooling (I won't go into other forms of cooling now, but I'm pretty sure it should be possible with one of the newer Zalman coolers) it will suffice. If both can, I guess it's really not a problem.

But I have heard that the Abit has multiplier problems versus AGP and PCI slots. Still this is only at more than 300 FSB, and I don't think I will have to go that high to get 3.75 out of a 3.0, will I?