My Northwood 2.4 oc'ed to 3.2 (400fsb oc'd to 533fsb in my sig) is starting to exhibit the Northwood "slow" death syndrome after folding nearly 24x7 since last March.... it's now randomly hanging and rebooting, despite running fairly cool, but with the wire-pin voltage mod to get 3.2Ghz out of it.
I've got a chance to get one of these new 3.0E Prescotts (OEM, socket 478) for a really good price, and of course I'll have to get a new mobo, memory, etc. My existing Thermalright SP-94 heatsink should be ideal for the Prescott chip too, and I hope to still be able to use my existing Antec 400W (not a "TrueXXX" series, but the old fashioned plain 400W PSU). I'm not too concerned with SATA or onboard RAID controllers since I have a pair of 120GB Seagate regular ATA/100 hard drives hosted on a Promise PCI raid card I intend to re-use.
What is the general opinion for the #1 overclocking mobo for these Prescotts these days? I'd like to stick with either ASUS of ABIT since I've had best luck with these two brands over the years.
Seems like the ABIT IC7, IC7-G or IC7-MAX3 and ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe are the most talked about mobos for oc'ing a Prescott. The ASUS is hideously priced... at about $180. The IC7-MAX3 is almost impossible to locate right now, and is also very expensive at the one website I found that has some in stock. The plain IC7 and IC7-G are much more affordable, but many owners are reporting that the onboard audio leaves a lot to be desired. Is the audio on the IC7-G really all that bad? Is the ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe really worth $55 more than an ABIT IC7-G ? I desire to overclock the snot out of the Prescott chip, and use the machine for heavy gaming and folding when I'm not gaming. Audio quality is important to me, but I don't really want to buy an add-in soundcard.
I've also thought somewhat about the 865 chipset mobos, but recently helped a friend build a new machine around an ASUS P4P800-SE mobo, and it was OK and did overclock fairly well, but it didn;t really knock my socks off.
