Hi, I'm going to buy kc8adu's P4 3.0ghz 800FSB sSpec; sl6wk
It will be for a friend to me that currently has an 0.18µ AMD Athlon XP 2000+ Palomino and a Epox 8KRA2I.
He has 4 harddrives, 2 on a Promise TX100 PCI RAID controller, one on a SATA PCI controller and one connected to the mobos IDE ports... As fate has it his Seagate Barracuda SATA2 500GB harddrive did not like the VIA VT8237 southbridge (a known issue)
He also has two DVD drives. And now for the tricky part; a ATI Radeon 9700Pro that he want to hold on to until he has more money so he in the future can go PCIe...
I've been eyeing the ASUS P4V800D-X mainboard, at 65$ it's really a bargain... But since this will be my first P4 system build since I had a Pentium 200MMX I think I need a little feedback on if it's a good choice or there maybe are any better choices out there...
It's atleast based off the new VIA VT8237R+ so the SATA2 issue should have been resolved ;-)
I don't know much about the VIA PT880 Ultra chipset though, is it any good? Also of concern would be that the system can lock it's PCIe, AGP and PCI busses so I can overclock the processor, since it is a nice stepping according to kc8adu that might have some overclocking headroom...
So the mobo needs to have:
Both AGP8X and a PCIe x16 physical slot
Minimum of two PCI 33mhz slots, one for Promise controller the other for Creative soundcard, but ofcourse more than 2 would be good for expansion possibility...
2 IDE ports (Since he is using two DVD drives and one IDE harddrive right now...)
Atleast 2 SATA port, more always welcome...
Onboard NIC
Preferably 4 DIMM slots because he is currently using 2x 512MB sticks (to provide upgrade headroom...)
A Serial DB9 port, can of course install a PCI based controller but that would steal away a PCI slot...
The ASUS P4V800D-X has all these features and then some, though I need
on if it's a good choice or any even better exists...
There is one design issue with the P4V800D-X IMO, the PCIe connector is right above the PCI slots so if he install a nice quiet Zalman cooler on whatever PCIe GFX card he buys he will loose two PCI slots
Currently he has a Zalman Heatpipe cooler on the 9700Pro but there will be ample room for it since the AGP slot and PCIe slot have a distance between them...
It will be for a friend to me that currently has an 0.18µ AMD Athlon XP 2000+ Palomino and a Epox 8KRA2I.
He has 4 harddrives, 2 on a Promise TX100 PCI RAID controller, one on a SATA PCI controller and one connected to the mobos IDE ports... As fate has it his Seagate Barracuda SATA2 500GB harddrive did not like the VIA VT8237 southbridge (a known issue)
He also has two DVD drives. And now for the tricky part; a ATI Radeon 9700Pro that he want to hold on to until he has more money so he in the future can go PCIe...
I've been eyeing the ASUS P4V800D-X mainboard, at 65$ it's really a bargain... But since this will be my first P4 system build since I had a Pentium 200MMX I think I need a little feedback on if it's a good choice or there maybe are any better choices out there...
It's atleast based off the new VIA VT8237R+ so the SATA2 issue should have been resolved ;-)
I don't know much about the VIA PT880 Ultra chipset though, is it any good? Also of concern would be that the system can lock it's PCIe, AGP and PCI busses so I can overclock the processor, since it is a nice stepping according to kc8adu that might have some overclocking headroom...
So the mobo needs to have:
Both AGP8X and a PCIe x16 physical slot
Minimum of two PCI 33mhz slots, one for Promise controller the other for Creative soundcard, but ofcourse more than 2 would be good for expansion possibility...
2 IDE ports (Since he is using two DVD drives and one IDE harddrive right now...)
Atleast 2 SATA port, more always welcome...
Onboard NIC
Preferably 4 DIMM slots because he is currently using 2x 512MB sticks (to provide upgrade headroom...)
A Serial DB9 port, can of course install a PCI based controller but that would steal away a PCI slot...
The ASUS P4V800D-X has all these features and then some, though I need
on if it's a good choice or any even better exists...There is one design issue with the P4V800D-X IMO, the PCIe connector is right above the PCI slots so if he install a nice quiet Zalman cooler on whatever PCIe GFX card he buys he will loose two PCI slots
Currently he has a Zalman Heatpipe cooler on the 9700Pro but there will be ample room for it since the AGP slot and PCIe slot have a distance between them...
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