Need suggestions. Best Board right now from Asus

I'm a computer Tech. Built many machines over the last 20 years. But,
the last 2 years I do mostly server work and networking.

So, I'm out of touch with motherboards, chipsets, and such.

I generally stick to Abit or ASus boards for my home machines.
Machines will be used for a lot of things, but i build my machines as
gaming machines in mind for speed.

Looking for suggestion for the BEST Intel P4 board right now

1.I do not want an Athlon, please do not say you know what...
2. Don't care about Raid ( although I will probaby get it for future
use)
3. I have a lot of EIDE drives still, so EIDE with Serial ATA would be
cool
4. I want speed, and stability as well as ( most important ) future
upgradeability. I want a board that is capable of taking a much
faster chip then is out today.
5. I don't overclock a lot, but I find that a good overclocking board
is great for future upgrading. For example: If I can overclock a
chip ( in theory) to 4 gig now, then once the 4 gigs are out I should
be able to use them.

6. do NOT care for onboard anything....aka video/sound. Except LAN
which is just useful, but the rest I will be using my own cards

7. Must take the fastest ram today
8. ability to take more then 4 drives would be nice

It's been a long time since I upgraded my personal machine. Lets put
it this way. The last board I bought for myself was an Abit 440BX
BE6-II. I love this board. LAsted forever, started with a Celeron 300
oc'd. Then later stuck in a P3 1.0gig when they were cheap. 8 hard
drives and stable as can be ( once you figure it out ) that's now
my home server, and if I could find today's version of that board, I'd
be so happy.

In article , Newf !!!
writes
2. Don't care about Raid ( although I will probaby get it for future
use)
3. I have a lot of EIDE drives still, so EIDE with Serial ATA would be
cool

I'm confused.
You say you don't care about RAID.... but you will probably get it
later!?! So do you want it or not???

And if you have a lot of EIDE drives ...... why would serial ATA be
cool?? (Are you under the impression that you can daisychain these like
a USB port or something???)

--
__________________________________________
Gareth Jones

"Reality sucks - go watch a Star Trek"

To email, remove the '_ns_' from

__________________________________________

On Sat, 1 Nov 2003 12:45:24 +0000, Gareth Jones
wrote:

In article , Newf !!!
writes
2. Don't care about Raid ( although I will probaby get it for future
use)
3. I have a lot of EIDE drives still, so EIDE with Serial ATA would be
cool

I'm confused.
You say you don't care about RAID.... but you will probably get it
later!?! So do you want it or not???

And if you have a lot of EIDE drives ...... why would serial ATA be
cool?? (Are you under the impression that you can daisychain these like
a USB port or something???)


I'm not going out purposely trying to get a sata only board. But,
there are many boards with both, and if I get it in one...great....if
not....I don't care

Samething for Raid. If I get it....fine, if not, I really don't care.
It's not something pick my mobo's around.

In article , Newf !!!
writes
I'm not going out purposely trying to get a sata only board. But,
there are many boards with both, and if I get it in one...great....if
not....I don't care

Samething for Raid. If I get it....fine, if not, I really don't care.
It's not something pick my mobo's around.


In that case.....
There are a lot of good boards out there. In the last month I've built
up two systems around the A7V600, Athlon XP2500 (Barton) and Some
twinmos DDR400 RAM (the XP2500 only needs DDR333, but its almost the
same price for the DDR400 and then you can clock the board at that speed
(or more!) with no problems at all) with Maxtor ATA133 120GB drives.
If you get the retail box CPU, you stand a very good chance of being
able to run the chip from 1.8GHz to around 2.2GHz (Xp3200 or so) without
any need to overvolt so reliability and heat aren't an issue.

The above systems are verrry fast and verrry reasonable cost wise!

The Mobo has a great spec in a very standard form (and no need for dual
channel ram etc)
Has 2 standard EIDE133 ports for 4 devices
And two SATA RAID ports.
USB2, gigabit lan, 5.1 sound etc etc

Only thing really missing is onboard firewire - but as I had an Audigy
card in - didn't really matter :-)

--
__________________________________________
Gareth Jones

"Reality sucks - go watch a Star Trek"

To email, remove the '_ns_' from

__________________________________________

As I said before, I don't want an Athlon.

intel.




On Sun, 2 Nov 2003 10:55:26 +0000, Gareth Jones
wrote:

In article , Newf !!!
writes
I'm not going out purposely trying to get a sata only board. But,
there are many boards with both, and if I get it in one...great....if
not....I don't care

Samething for Raid. If I get it....fine, if not, I really don't care.
It's not something pick my mobo's around.


In that case.....
There are a lot of good boards out there. In the last month I've built
up two systems around the A7V600, Athlon XP2500 (Barton) and Some
twinmos DDR400 RAM (the XP2500 only needs DDR333, but its almost the
same price for the DDR400 and then you can clock the board at that speed
(or more!) with no problems at all) with Maxtor ATA133 120GB drives.
If you get the retail box CPU, you stand a very good chance of being
able to run the chip from 1.8GHz to around 2.2GHz (Xp3200 or so) without
any need to overvolt so reliability and heat aren't an issue.

The above systems are verrry fast and verrry reasonable cost wise!

The Mobo has a great spec in a very standard form (and no need for dual
channel ram etc)
Has 2 standard EIDE133 ports for 4 devices
And two SATA RAID ports.
USB2, gigabit lan, 5.1 sound etc etc

Only thing really missing is onboard firewire - but as I had an Audigy
card in - didn't really matter :-)

In article , Newf !!!
writes
As I said before, I don't want an Athlon.

Ah.... That's the danger of snipping posts I guess....


Your choice of course. I can't help with an Asus P4 board as the only
one I've built for a P4 has been Abit.

I always used to be an Intel man myself in the past. Not at this moment
in CPU history though I'm afraid......

--
__________________________________________
Gareth Jones

"Reality sucks - go watch a Star Trek"

To email, remove the '_ns_' from

__________________________________________