Am I crazy for considering an Intel motherboard?

[Hulk]

I'm considering buying the Intel branded P4 DDR motherboard.

I don't overclock, so that isn't a concern. I haven't since I had a 300A. I don't like pushing the fsb so that the AGP or PCI busses are out of spec. 66>100 was fine but it doens't seem like there are any P4's that will go 100>133. I'm really most concerned with stabilty.

I don't really need RAID either. I back up my files to a removable drive every few days so that's not a problem. I also don't think I'd notice the extra speed. I just like to keep it simple and reliable.

Also, my application is Ulead's MediaStudio Pro 6.5. Hard disk speed isn't that big a deal, it's mainly rendering time, and in this application MHz rules, that's why I'm going P4 instead of Athlon.

I'd like to try the SIS 645 but am worried about stability.

What do you guys think?

 

[AndyHui]

Intel motherboards are simple, reliable.

I would prefer ASUS, but you really can't beat an Intel board if you have absolutely no time to deal with any issues.

 

[Demon-Xanth]

Intel makes board that work all the time (though some have quirks). But thier P4 chipsets fall behind both the Via and the SIS P4 DDR chipsets.

 

[Jhhnn]

It's hard to argue with genuine Intel from a stability slant. Their chipsets are very solid, and the boards are well made. Avoid the sdram w/ P4 solutions, what you want is either ddr or rambus memory. The Sis and Via solutions are a little young to say whether they're buggy or not....

Might consider Gigabyte as an alternative to genuine intel- their basic focus is also stability, reliability, ease of use.

 

[Mem]

It`s your money your choice buy what you are happy with,Intel boards are excellent .

 

[jsmckenna45431]

A few months ago I would have agreed that you were crazy for buying an Intel board, but I have to admit that Intel makes a stable chipset. It may not perform like an AMD system, but what good is performance when it is constantly having issues.

 

[jeremyja]

Which ever version you receive, make sure the location you buy it from is not giving you one of though goofy service 90 days... Compusa here is columbus is selling their stuff for 90 days of support, and charging extra beyond that point. Make sure you get support for that full year.

Jeremy

 

[RalfHutter]

I just built my dad a P4 1.8/478 using the new Intel D845BG DDR board with 512Mb Crucial.

I must say that I'm very impressed with it, and I'm an AMD kinda guy. It's certainly stable but it's also fast and disk I/O is great. It's nice knowing that there won't be any Via issues with this board.

It also runs WAY cool compared to my 1.4 T-bird. I'm using the stock Intel HSF in a Antec SX635 case with one stock exhaust fan. It runs 35-40C normally and 45-50C if I Prime95 it. It's also SUPER quiet compared to my big Athlon box.

Board has onboard LAN + 4 USB ports also. Makes it pretty versatile.

BIOS is pretty boring and unconfigurable, but it gets the job done.

I'd give this board 2 thumbs up and that's saying a lot from a pretty die-hard AMD guy.

 

[CROSSeyed]

If I were going Intel I'd get the Abit BD7. Uses Intel chipset, but has lockable PCI bus speeds so things don't get outta whack when pushin FSB. First of its kind as I recall. Why didn't they think of that sooner.

 

[Dewey]

Choose what is best for you and don't get caught up in the AMD vs. Intel war. Whoever makes the right solution for you should get your money. You are the consumer so you always win!

 

[AA0]

hm... your statement about Mhz rules in that app is wrong though. I couldn't care what cpu you take, but Mhz x Instruction per clock is the performance of the chip. No matter how many Mhz you have, it won't matter if the IPC is low. Performance wise, both chips are very close, with the XPs being faster, but I haven't bothered looking at 2.2Ghz intels, so who knows.

 

[Funky303]

just head up to. www.anadtech.com, there is a brand new review of athlon XP vs. Intel Northwood 2.0A & 2.2 GHz, but also all other Intel P4 & Athlon XP processors.

The review covers all kinda bench progs from Content Creation to Internet Creation th CAD to Office Bench to Games & Rendering with Maya & §D Studio, but also things like media encoding.

At least you can compare the performance between the P4s and the AthlonsXP with their own slower processors.

 

[Hulk]

AA0 -

In MS Pro 6.5, MHz does in fact, rule.

I've been hosting a benchmarking site for 2 years and can speak to this.

MS Pro 6.5 Benchmark Site

As I said in the original post, I'm most concerned with DV rendering performance, and in this SPECIFIC bench, Athlon is only very marginally faster than P4. Not enough to offset the current MHz advantage of the P4.

You will notice that the Athlon XP needs about 116 MHz to render 1 frame per second.
An XP 2000+ would give about 14.4 frames per second

P4 needs about 128 MHz to render 1fps
A P4 2200 would render about 17.2fps

The Athlon XP is an awesome processor and kicks the P4's ass in most apps, this is just one of those exception because it is SSE II optimized.

 

[AA0]

Its the SSEII, not the Mhz. Mhz means absolutely nothing.

 

[DoubleL]

Well if you are looking for something stable good luck with Intel, That is why I left Intel, I just got tired of working on the things all the time but it has been some time since I left Intel so maybe they have some stable boards out now The last one I had was a Asus P2B-S, Everything on it was SCSI, I shot it and went to AMD- Good luck and like they say if you have to ask then most likely you are

 

[DaveSimmons]

The Antec sx-635 / intel D850 / p4 1.6/478 system I put together for my parents has been very stable and is also very quiet. Stock HSF and 1 case fan, temp is 40-41 C after playing some Quake2 or UT to stress-test it.