Need big help with new mobo decision

[wolverinero79]

Is 865 really worth it? That's my main question...

My current motherboard, Soyo P4S Dragon Ultra, i think is dying (i blame fry's). I'm in the business for looking for a new mobo. I have a 1.7 p4, a piece of 512 MB corsair ddr 2700 ram, a PNY 4200 AGP video card and two IDE Hard drives (no RAID).

Obviously i love my ram and video card and don't want to upgrade for at least a year. But my chip i may upgrade in December. I'd like an ASUS board because i've heard about their stability and quality. So i have my choices pinned at the P4S800 and the P4P800.

Besides a whole bunch of extras that i really don't want (giga-bit LAN card, SATA), the only major difference is the chipset (P4S800 is SiS648, the P4P800 is 865PE + ICH5R). The price difference (c/o newegg) is $30. Is the 865 chipset really worth that much more? In other words, will i see a significant performance loss due to purchasing the 648 (although both mobo's will give a little boost due to my vid card currently being chained at 4x)?

Thanks in advance, all



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[jmecor]

go with the p4p800 it offers better performance than the SiS one. And also consider upgrading your intel cpu with a "c" mark that supports 800-fsb and ht, so you can make better use of the mobo.

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[jmecor]

And if you want to overclock get at least a PC3200 ram from corsair or kingston.

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[pIII_Man]

i would go for the p4p800... however if you do indeed want to hang on to your ram you will not be able use dual channel...so if can't take advantage of many of the features i suppose the sis chipset won't be so bad...

Probably by september the p5 will be shipping on its new socket...and ddrII will be out...so IMO i would go with a cheep 400/533mhz bus board and wait it out...but then again thats just my opinion....but since you will be using few features of the p4p it may be the better option...

Agp 4x...assuming you have an 8x version if the t14200...it will only help when playing new games at very high resolution with max detail...but still then only a 5-10% fps increase at best

Also are you using a socket 470 or 423 processor?

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[HardWareBoss]

Mobo I'm using Abit IS7 with P4 2.4c. Ram you will at least need PC3200 or PC3500 thats what I'm using.

 

[Crashman]

If you're not planning to upgrade the CPU, the RAM would be fine for either board. AGP8x still means nothing. And as much praise as your former board got, it still used the sucky VIA chipset.

The P4P800 would be fine. In fact, you could run dual channel with another stick of what you have, if you liked, using your current processor. You simply can't run dual channel with PC2700 on 800 bus processors.

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[wolverinero79]

Thanks for all the advice and options to consider.

I went with the P4P800 for a couple reasons (the largest being that I'm hoping the Intel chipset will be a little more reliable than the SiS).

Assuming my next mobo lasts longer than my current one (grr), I'll have the option to either do a small chip upgrade soon (2.4 or something like that), or just wait and upgrade my RAM to DDR 400 and chip to a 3.0 800 FSB. You know, it's not a bad thing to already have components that are basically the lowest supported by a new motherboard

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