Which socket 478 875 board should I get?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Rich Heimlich
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Rich Heimlich

I currently own a Gigabyte GA-8IK1100 that Tom's Hardware recommended
several months back. I bought a retail P4 2.8Ghz processor, Radeon
9800 Pro and Kingston DDR400 (two pieces of 512) to go with it and the
performance has NEVER been right with it.

In 3DMark01 and 03 I get scores around 9400 and 2000 respectively,
which is just aweful for these pieces. I've spent months with
Gigabyte, great techs, great friends and Internet sources (and I'm a
tweaker going way back myself) and nothing has fixed it.

So at this point I just want to take what I have and move it to
another board that will allow me to get the performance I should and
work well without having to bother with a lot of overclocking and
such. I'm fine with fairly default settings.

The board would also need to handle SATA, but not in a RAID array. I
have an 80GB SATA drive and two 120GB ATA drives, but really have no
interest in running RAID right now.

I also don't need onboard audio or video but as long as it can be
disabled, I'm fine. What's the best ASUS board for me?
 
Rich Heimlich said:
I currently own a Gigabyte GA-8IK1100 that Tom's Hardware recommended
several months back. I bought a retail P4 2.8Ghz processor, Radeon
9800 Pro and Kingston DDR400 (two pieces of 512) to go with it and the
performance has NEVER been right with it.

In 3DMark01 and 03 I get scores around 9400 and 2000 respectively,
which is just aweful for these pieces. I've spent months with
Gigabyte, great techs, great friends and Internet sources (and I'm a
tweaker going way back myself) and nothing has fixed it.

So at this point I just want to take what I have and move it to
another board that will allow me to get the performance I should and
work well without having to bother with a lot of overclocking and
such. I'm fine with fairly default settings.

The board would also need to handle SATA, but not in a RAID array. I
have an 80GB SATA drive and two 120GB ATA drives, but really have no
interest in running RAID right now.

I also don't need onboard audio or video but as long as it can be
disabled, I'm fine. What's the best ASUS board for me?
Click to expand...

If the processor gets too hot, the P4 has internal thermal
throttling, where it reduces the effective clock rate,
in an attempt to cool the die. Do you have enough cooling
for the processor ?

Have you loaded up on utilities that list the specs for
the board, such as CPUZ, Aida32, Sandra etc ? Are you
certain of the memory timing parameters and clock
speeds ?

My concern would be, if you buy another motherboard, the
same thing might happen. Better to solve the problem
with the board you've got.

If a motherboard crashes and cannot be made stable, then
crush it with a hammer and buy a new one. If it just
refuse to perform up to par, keep working on it.

Check Google, and see if there are any other reports
of your Gigabyte motherboard model having that problem.
If there are no other reports, then maybe the problem
is something easy to fix. If everyone has the problem
and there is no solution in sight, buy another board.

There are multiple Asus websites, and the motherboard
page lists the products available:

(The usa.asus.com site is down for me right now...)
http://www.asus.it/products/mb/mbindex.htm

Any of the P4P800 (865) or P4C800 (875) boards are
good ones. The P4C800 boards are slightly better for
overclocking (no video artifacts at super-high overclock).
The only board I haven't heard anything about is the -SE
board. I think it has a Wifi slot for a $25 wireless lan
card.

The P4P800-VM is a microATX, and virtually all Asus
microATX boards have spartan BIOS setup screens with
few overclocker friendly features.

You can download the motherboard manual for any Asus
retail board from the download page. I recommend reading
the feature summary page, and also reading all of the
BIOS screen setup pages, so you know what adjustments
you are getting. Adjustable Vcore, Vdimm, and Vagp
are useful features to have, as are memory timing
adjustments and clock rates.

(Download page - I selected the Italian site as it
sometimes is less loaded than some of the others.
Enter the motherboard model number, and select "All"
in the menu.)

http://www.asus.it/support/download/download.aspx

HTH,
Paul
 
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