what's the best motherboard for a 1.6a?

[m1ke101]

i've decided its time to upgrade my 1.2 athlon to a p4 1.6a, and my question is, whats a good motherboard to pair it up with? i'm not looking for any of the extras, like onboard audio, lan, video, or raid. i already have two sticks of ddr from my athlon system, and i'm hoping i can get a board thats less than $100....or is that too much to ask?

 

[WaTaGuMp]

The popular choice is the Asus P4266, we have seen some great overclocks here with the 1.6 and that board. My friend here has one also but he has a 2.2 gig chip. As for $100 bucks you cant get the Asus for that much.

 

[CoDerEd]

Yeah the popular here is ASUS oth the P4B266 and P4S333
I ordered MSI though, it because of the feature.
it has $5 off from Newegg if you order it with the CPU.
I need RAID for extra IDE device and MSI seems to be
the less expenssive one with RAID compare to ABIT, Gigabyte and SOYO.
and also :Intel 845 DDR Motherboard Roundup

peace

 

[CoDerEd]

See this thread also.

 

[Barrei]

Spend a little more and go with the gigabyte 8irxp , it's a great mobo.

 

[m1ke101]

is the P4S333 any good?

 

[Mark0999]

I have the MSI 845 Ultra-AR with ATA133 RAID. Currently, I am running a 1.8A @ 2.4Ghz and 1.7V using the wire trick.

http://www.hexus.net/review.php?review=278

The vcore on many of the P4 boards, by default, max out at 1.65V with a Northwood installed. My MSI board is an example, but using the wire trick, the vcore now tops out at 1.85V.

The Asus boards probably offer the best chance at overclocking a 1.6A or 1.8A. Vcore tweaks are not influenced by using a Northwood and the voltage can be set up to 1.775V (I believe).

 

[o1die]

Epox 4sda+ has raid, ata 133, onboard diagnostics, and voltage adjustments for cpu, memory, and agp. Cpu adjustments go up to about 1.85 via bios or jumpers. All for less than $100. Running by 1.6a at 137 fsb (2.19 gigs) with memory at 4:5 ratio (171 fsb). Cpu voltage is 1.65 and memory is set at +.2.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

<< is the P4S333 any good? >>

It's very good, a lot of us are using it with excellent results although that can be said of most of the boards using the SiS645 chipset at the moment. I'm able to run my P4 1.6A/P4S333@145FSB= 2.32ghz w/1.575Vcore. It will do more but I'm satisfied as is.....for now

 

[Athlon4all]

Go for Abit TH7II/Asus P4T-E + Samsung PC800 RDRAM and oc to 533fsb. You may get faster CPU clock speeds with P4B266, but the 533fsb+PC1066 RDRAM setup will still be faster

 

[m1ke101]

i was looking around at newegg and i noticed the MSI 645 Ultra and the ECS SiS645, both pretty inexpensive. anyone know anything about these boards, and if i can overclock them well?

 

[Bingo13]

Gigabyte 8SRX is great board for overclocking and is very inexpensive. link

 

[Boogak]

Does the 8SRX require the wire trick to get it to boot at higher voltages?

 

[m1ke101]

guess the 8srx wins!

 

[Bingo13]

Boogak,

No wire trick is required. In fact I can my 1.8a at a lower voltage than on my i845/850 platforms at the same overclock.

 

[Boogak]

Schweet, I just bought one from mwave for $82 shipped. I have a hard time justifying spending over $100 on a motherboard now, my K7S5A spoiled me silly. Lessee how far my Crucial PC2100 memory takes me

 

[F155mph]

<< Gigabyte 8SRX is great board for overclocking and is very inexpensive. link >>



Bingo,

Did you get a bulk discount on the P4 2.0a? How many computers do you have? All I have to say is wow!!! Do you own a computer store or something?


I got the 8SRX myself and I think for the price is GREAT. But be prepare to spend many hours to get everything to work. If you got the Radeon 8500 updated the bios before you install the driver or it will crash. My just crashed two days ago and took me a day and half to get it working again. I keep getting "Bad disk errrors" and XP would not load. I tried recovery, safe mode, and everything else. It turn out that the bios crash on me. So I have to flash it, but afterward it still didn't work. I got "bad disk errors" and the mobo didn't detect I have any HD. So I flash the bios again doing it steps from version f5,f6,f7,and f8. After you do the flash make sure you go back into the bios and "LOAD OPTIMAL SETTINGS". Now I got everything running and been running Prime95 from 1am last night and it was still running when I left for work. Right not my 1.6a@2.2 1.55v on the bios. I am still a little leary of o/c more cause last time i did that, that when the system crashed on me.

Oh for people who have this board, does your fan rpm monitor work on MBM5? Also are you guys getting crazy temp from the Bios PC health thing? Lastly why the voltage read different in MBM5 as compare to the bios. When it is at default bios at 1.5 my MBM5 read the vcore voltage as 1.47 its drop when the cpu is loaded. Why doesn't the new bios have the ram timing settings? Can you get the board to boot when the voltage is set to 1.8?

 

[WaTaGuMp]

I will give props to the Abit boards for the fact they have an AGP and PCI bus divider feature. I can only go as high as 120 FSB with my Soyo Fire Dragon cause im already at about 40 on the AGP and PCI bus cause my mobo doesnt have dividers to keep them in spec. But oh well my mobo makes up for it in speed tests accoring to what Toms hardware said.