Dave_s said:
I am trying to decide between having a PC built for me using either an
ASUS P4P800-E DELUXE mobo or an INTEL D865PERLK mobo.
The Asus board will allow overclocking. Intel boards generally
don't.
Can someone please give me a URL providing a very accurate description
of exact contents of the ASUS mobo and what is supplied with the RETAIL
BOXED version?
There are two sources of info I can think of. If you look for a
product on the Newegg.com site, they have pictures of the box
contents. The downloadable user's manual contains a manifest
towards the front of the manual (pg.15) -
http://www.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/sock478/P4P800-E DX/e1526_p4p800-e_deluxe.pdf
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=13-131-492&depa=0
(click pictures on the left of the page)
Is anyone using this mobo with a PRESCOTT Pentium CPU, the one with the
1 MBYTE L2 cache? Any troubles, issues?
Neither of these boards support ATA U133 Hard Drives, both support ATA
U100. Does only ATA U100 seem to slow 7200 RPM 8 MBYTE BUFFERED HArd Drives?
The sustained media (head) data rate is less than U100, so the
difference really isn't that significant. A Raptor manages 70MB
per second (that is a SATA drive) and that is the best non-SCSI
drive I know of. You can make an argument that bursting into
the cache of the drive is significant, but short write bursts
will be interrupted by seeks and the like. Perhaps Storagereview.com
has some words of wisdom for you...
If it bothers you that much, go with a SATA drive. The Raptor
would make a good match for the Southbridge SATA interface, and
that interface connects to the rest of the system via a 266MB/sec
bus. This means the practical PCI bus limit of ~100MB/sec would
not be an issue. A drive with the performance of the Raptor will
make more of a difference than cranking up the cabling. Similarly,
in situations where there is a lot of head movement, the Raptor
will blow away the competition due to the higher rotation rate
(reduces average rotational latency).
The shop that built my first computer, was careful to give me
the motherboard box, all leftover motherboard parts (cables),
and the box of screws that comes with the case. Your builder
should do the same for you.
Assembling your own really isn't that difficult, but the
advantage of having a shop assemble it, is if they find a
defective component, they can replace it from stock. It would
take you a lot longer to locate the fault and arrange a
replacement, doing the build at home. So, if your time is
valuable, or the deadline to have a working system is short,
a good shop like the now-bankrupt place I used, is the place
to go.
HTH,
Paul
