P4 system recommendations

[Goi]

I had a similar thread but nobody was paying much attention so I'm starting a new one...

Anyway, I'm helping a friend of mine build a P4 system, basically its down to the i845PE boards and the SiS648 boards. The i845PE candidates are just the pretty expensive ASUS P4PE and the Gigabyte one, whereas there are a few more candidates in the SiS648 corner for like almost half the price.

He'll be running at least 1GB of memory so I recommended PC2700 to him since PC3200 isn't reliable when you fill up the banks. He also wants to upgrade next year to a HT enabled P4, so I'm wondering if the SiS648 chipsets support that? If so, the price of the SiS648 and its relative performance might make it a more favorable choice than the more expensive i845PE boards. What SiS648 boards are good then?

Thanks!

 

[reelbigfish214]

No one knows yet if the 648 boards will support HyperThreading. I have an Abit SR7-8X and I love it. Now with all of these boards you can have up to 2GB of DDR333, but you can only use 2 slots, so you would need 2x512 otherwise it will slow down to DDR266 speeds, at least that is what the manuals say. Never actually tested this since I do not have three sticks of DDR333 lying around. As for the board itself it is probably your best bet. It is the cheapest, at or around $100, and has everything you could want. It has USB 2.0, LAN, sound, plenty of PCI slots, no CNR slot. Though, it doesn't have gigabit LAN like the MSI, which costs more for basically the same thing. The Shuttle is also a very good buy at $120. I forget if it has LAN, but I know it has RAID. If you don't want raid, don't bother and save yourself at least $20 and go with the Abit. As for Intel boards, the PE is good. It only lacks AGP 8X, but if you are keeping this board a long time, who knows how important AGP 8X will be once everything is optimized for it. It's basically a toss up. I wouldn't decide until you know the SiS suports hyper threading or not

 

[Goi]

Yeah that's what I figured. The uncertainty of HT support on the SiS648 chipset is disturbing though. Anyway, you mention you need to have 2 memory sticks for optimal performance? How so? If that's the case, wouldn't my friend have to go with 2x1GB if he needed 2GB?

 

[Goi]

Oh well, nevermind, my friend went ahead and bought the Asus P4PE, so its a done deal...thanks for the advice though.

 

[MIGhunter]

I have an Asus and there are driver updates that enable hyperthreading. So, it may be that the Asus he bought is capable of HT.