Motherboard Selection Help

[jugbugs]

I have been having problems with my PC CHips MoBo and such I am in the market for a new (and far superior one). The two I have been looking at are as follows:

MSI 848P Neo-LS Single Channel

ASUS P4P800S Single Channel

So far I have been looking at single channel RAM so I dont have to buy more RAM. My question to you is this... Which brand should I go with, these two are just some early choices. Also, is there really a big advantage in switching to dual channel RAM? For that you may need a list of things I like to do with this PC. I like to game a bit, mostly online including Halo, I do a bit of video editing (thus my board needs to have SATA built in) and I want to do some prime searching. Any help would be appreciated, Thanks.

[geoff]

It seems no-one is willing to make a recommendation. I won't either, since my choices of motherboard so far have not been that great :-(.

Note that you can still use your RAM in a dual channel board. If the sticks are not well enough matched to run in dual channel mode then just put them in adjacent slots and they will run in single channel mode.

[Bionic_Redneck]

Hey wait a minute those aren't socket 462 boards

you can't go wrong with asus or msi. I have never had one but Abit is suppose to be real good.

[jugbugs]

Thanks a bunch for the help so far, I was under the impression that a dual channel board only operated in dual mode. If it can operate in single channel that would be awsome for me now because I am not ready to spring for more RAM atm. Is it a selection you make in bios or does is auto select Dual/single channel?

No they are Socket 478 boards. :p

The company I bought my PC Chips board from said they have 2 PC chips and 1 ECS board as their "testing" boards and none of those pass the Prime 95 torture test, which puzzles me.

Perhaps it might be easier for some to post what Mobo, RAM setup they currently have and what success (if any) they have had with it.

[geoff]

I have a Gigabyte GA-8IG1000-MK with a P4 2.4 800FSB and 2x256MB Kingmax DDR 400. These were all selected with low price as a high priority :-)

The motherboard is basically solid, but will not do a network boot from the onboard LAN (even though there is a LAN boot option in the BIOS), the RAM multiplier is 6:5 instead of 5:4 (the manual says otherwise) so a 250FSB overclock pushes the ram from DDR333 to DDR417 instead of DDR400. There are no voltage controls in the BIOS.

The board has 4 memory slots. If you put the RAM sticks in slots 1,3 or 2,4 (or all 4) then it automatically selects dual channel mode. If you put them in slots 1,2 or 3,4 it selects single channel. There are no BIOS controls for this.
My RAM fails memtest86 test #4 when it is in dual channel mode, but is fine in single channel mode. (The machine has turned in a number of matching doublechecks, and no bad results, overclocked at 245FSB/408DDR. The primenet name for this machine is 97030014/piv).

[nucleon]

Geoff,

From memory the gigabyte boards have a special key-sequence to enter the special cpu configuration menus to access voltage etc...

I think it's ctrl-f1 or similar. It's not mentioned in any of the manuals, just something I read online.

I have a gigabyte board here, can't 8IPE1000. I'm very happy with it. I recommend gigabyte boards as they have great performance/price/features ratios.

-- Craig

[jugbugs]

Thanks for the input so far, still looking for more.

[geoff]

Originally Posted by nucleon

From memory the gigabyte boards have a special key-sequence to enter the special cpu configuration menus to access voltage etc...

Yes ctrl-F1 brings up the advanced menus, which allows adjustment of the memory settings, clock speeds, etc. but no voltage adjustments on this board. I gather many other Gigabyte boards do have voltage controls though.

It is not a bad board for the price, but the 6:5 memory ratio is better suited to a 2.6GHz CPU or DDR433 RAM. And I really don't understand why anyone would design a board with built in LAN and not include a few lines of BIOS code to boot from it.

[PageFault]

I have two P4P800's, each running a 2.4C at 250 fsb (3000 MHz). One has 2 x 256 MB Geil Gold Dragoon in dual channel and the other has 1 x 256 MB Kingston Hyperx (all ram PC3200). There are no prime95 performance differences for dual / single channel mem operation. Both rigs are rock solid and have run uninterrupted since a power failure early January. Look me up on the TPR stats to see how many confirmed doublechecks the machines have done - large overclock and fully error free.

Originally Posted by jugbugs

Perhaps it might be easier for some to post what Mobo, RAM setup they currently have and what success (if any) they have had with it.

[Bionic_Redneck]

Server:
epox 8kha+ via 266a
Samsung DDR 2700+ 256mb
enhance 350w psu
XP1800+@2011 11.5x175
Maxtor 30gb ata100 and 20gb Quantum hdd's
Operating System: Gentoo w/ ltsp 4

4 diskless clients:
biostar m7vig via KM266
onboard nic via-rine 6103
3 xp1800+'s and 1 xp1700+
Crucial & Kingston ddr 2100+
psu's 300w

I Haven't seen any setups with P4's but would interesting to see what the performace per a dollar would be compared to XP's

[patrik]

The last one I bought was an ASUS P4P800S with a P4 2.4C. Kingston RAM 256MB DDR400 CL2.5 (KVR400X64C25/256).

I'm still in the process of verifying the overclock by running double-checks. So far, at 262 MHz FSB (3.14 GHz) and memory at DDR419, I have 12 matching DC's and no non-matching. (The result from 10653361 was returned 07-Mar-04 06:35 but is still not in the status files, which I don't understand why.) Maybe I will back off an extra MHz just to be safe from errors.