Hi all. Pretty sure my Abit IC7-G passed away on me this morning and I'm considering purchasing a new board while the dead one makes it way thru the RMA process. I know its been awhile since the release of Canterwood/Springdale and was wondering what the consensus is these days as to which board packs the most punch. I've done a few forum searches and quite a few people(more to the point previous IC7 owners) seem to end up going with an Asus P4C800 and seem to be wholly satisfied with it. In my eyes this board would be an acceptable replacement. However the price is still quite lofty on this board. I remember hearing the whole thing about the 865 chips having just as much performance as their bigger canterwood brothers and was wondering if this is still the case. So, own to the meat of this thread. IF you had up to $200 at your disposal and would be pairing a mainboard with a P4 2.4C, 1gig corsair 3500(2 x 512), radeon 9800pro, and 2 80gig IDE drives... which mainboard would you go with? This machine is strictly for gaming.
On a seperate note.. please check my diagnosing of the dead board here..
This machine has been acting strange for well over a month; random reboots, program errors, etc. I updated the bios of the IC7 this morning since it had been a couple months since this had been done. Well windows didn't seem to like this too much and refused to boot. OK.. great.. so reinstall windows. Upon trying a fresh install xp setup tells me that it cannot format my hard drive. Well I'm thinking this has to be a glitch or something.. so I try again. This time it goes thru; windows installs fine. I get all the way to installing all drivers and all windows updates. On the last windows update(windows media player 9) the machine just turns itself off and reboots.... and continues doing this. So now I'm saying WTF. Oh well time to try again. Go to reinstall windows AGAIN and this time it hits the same snag on formatting the hard drive. At this point I'm thinking the drive has failed. So I swap it out with another KNOWN-GOOD drive. Same results; windows setup cannot format this drive. I try replacing the ide cable.. same results. Now since I've tested both of those hard drives and cables and the dvd rom from which the winxp setup was running and they are all good. SO.. what do ya think? My best guess would be the IC7. Don't really think it would be the ram or cpu.. as a failure in either one of these areas would cause a no-post in most situations right?
Anywho.. let me know what you all think on both areas. Thanks.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the old machine was not overclocked in any way.. all this bad stuff was goin on with stock speeds/voltages/etc.
On a seperate note.. please check my diagnosing of the dead board here..
This machine has been acting strange for well over a month; random reboots, program errors, etc. I updated the bios of the IC7 this morning since it had been a couple months since this had been done. Well windows didn't seem to like this too much and refused to boot. OK.. great.. so reinstall windows. Upon trying a fresh install xp setup tells me that it cannot format my hard drive. Well I'm thinking this has to be a glitch or something.. so I try again. This time it goes thru; windows installs fine. I get all the way to installing all drivers and all windows updates. On the last windows update(windows media player 9) the machine just turns itself off and reboots.... and continues doing this. So now I'm saying WTF. Oh well time to try again. Go to reinstall windows AGAIN and this time it hits the same snag on formatting the hard drive. At this point I'm thinking the drive has failed. So I swap it out with another KNOWN-GOOD drive. Same results; windows setup cannot format this drive. I try replacing the ide cable.. same results. Now since I've tested both of those hard drives and cables and the dvd rom from which the winxp setup was running and they are all good. SO.. what do ya think? My best guess would be the IC7. Don't really think it would be the ram or cpu.. as a failure in either one of these areas would cause a no-post in most situations right?
Anywho.. let me know what you all think on both areas. Thanks.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the old machine was not overclocked in any way.. all this bad stuff was goin on with stock speeds/voltages/etc.