recommend a motherboard?

[iroc409]

ok, building a new workstation, and keeping my current computer as a toy... just for games and tweaking. i need a completely dedicated work-only box, and i'm planning on getting a p4 3.06 w/ HT. i'm really an amd guy (i.e. doesn't know anything about late-model intel), but i might be doing vid editing in the near future, and i hear intel does a little better with that. most of my work is web design and stuff, so the usual adobe & macromedia stuff. i assume the hammer is still several months off, i haven't heard anything new on its release. going to be shuffling some hardware from my current setup to the new box, to get more speed out of the toy box, as well.

now, what i really need help on is 2 things. first, the memory. i like this kingston stuff pretty well, it seems to be pretty fast, so i'd like to keep it, and migrate it to the workstation (upgrading to corsair xms in the game system). would i notice a huge difference between this and that crazy rdram or whatever? i see no real use to discard this stuff, and none of my other servers or anything use ddr

and, i need a good motherboard recommendation. 8x agp, onboard NIC is fine (using one now, seems to work well), not a big fan of onboard sound but hard not to get that anymore. i need firewire and usb 2.0, but the firewire doesn't _have_ to be on the machine. if the firewire is not on board, probably going to need like 5-6 pci slots. and that would be assuming NIC is onboard.

also, i haven't really been able to find one, but i'd really like to get a dual board. it's not a huge deal, but it'd be nice. i stress my machine fairly hard with a lot of programs.

this machine will not be overclocked, i just need reliability. features aren't a _huge_ deal, i don't need raid on board or anything like that. just looking for good reliable performance for a reasonable price. thanks.

[JSimmons]

If there was no compelling reason to do otherwise, I'd get a Mac.

[Pritorian]

For a Intel Platform -

Intel 3.0 Ghz CPU ( 800 FSB )
Ram Any good type of CL2 3200 Will work
And Asus or Abit CanterWood Chipset board. ( IC7 or P4C800 )

Both are really good and stable boards, and we use them here at work as testbed computers.

-P-

[iroc409]

Originally posted by JSimmons
If there was no compelling reason to do otherwise, I'd get a Mac.

i've really thought about getting a mac. though about it long and hard, but there are a few things. first, i haven't heard anyone give me a really good reason to switch. none. the only reason i can think of is because their laptops are pretty sweet.

a 3.06 p4 w/ HT beat out a dual 1.25 g4, comperably equipped. speed is fairly important here. also, there's no learning curve keeping a pc.

also, for $1000 i can build something with more features and speed than i can with $4000 with a mac. why should i spend the extra $3k for a different operating system? i would like to get one, but i'm going to wait until they catch up. i have heard however that they are apparently releasing a new chip at 2ghz with the mac. unfortunately i'm afraid that's going to be a $5000 desktop. not very reasonable.


thanks for the board advice, i'll check those out.

as far as price goes, the opterons are kinda pricey, but i see you can get an opteron 240 for a little over $200, i think that's a 1.4. i know they're geared towards servers, but would there be any merit in using a dual tyan opteron board for a desktop??


edit: i think my kingston stuff is 2700... i can't remember. i'm pretty sure it's not pc3200 tho

[Brad]

P4G8X for 533fsb
P4C800 for 800fsb

[MadDogMe]

Why throw money at a P4 system?. They are'nt that much better for editing are they?. To the tune of a few hundred dollars worth?...

An NF7 (S if you want SATA, LAN, Firewire, Onboardsound and USB2. It's worth the money even if you don't use it yet). 2500+ Barton for the extra L2 cache. Any old 3200Cas2 RAM. Antec truepower PSU cause they have an independant 12v rail that has voltage sensing & correction (CPU runs off 12v rail, not the 'traditional' 5v). VOILA!, you have a top knotch kick~ass rig. And I'd say running a RAID mirror is quite a big deal if it's a work box. How can having your work backed up automaticaly NOT BE?...

PS, you can run normal parallel ATA100/133 harddrives in RAID if you use two 'Serillel' adaptors to convert them to SATA ports. One comes with the mobo...

PPS, the SATA corruption issues have been fixed...

[ymboc]

Dunno... despite the fact that the MP(XP) chips have fell behind... If it were me I'd be looking at a Dual AMD machine... making sure that whatever mb I got has 64 bit PCI slots... and then drop a 64bit scsi raid card into it (along with the matching HDs in a RAID 0 + 1 array)

That being said anything with a couple 64 bit pci slots would do really (assuming you're going to go with a proper HD controller).

That's just me though...

[iroc409]

hrm... good suggestions. i've heard the intel chip is a little better at video editing. and besides, last i checked the barton 3000 and the pentium 3.06 are pretty similar in price range.

i don't need raid onboard... what i'm going to end up doing is getting the promise sx4000 controller (you know, the one you can throw 256mb of ram on), and running a 3x100gb hdd stripping array for video editing (probably just set it up for raid 5 with redundancy). i like that card, and performance seems to be really top-notch, which is more what i'm looking for.

my data is all going to be on a server, which i'm also going to be building soon. basically just a win server, probably a fairly cheap amd setup with raid. not really looking to store data on this machine a whole lot, and this way i can get to stuff from my other desktop, and the future laptop.

i would still consider an amd setup... if you can recommend a duallie board for amd. i'd *really* prefer a dual processor setup for this machine. i've been abusing my machine pretty hard lately.

i've also been considering a dual opteron setup, but i think that's a little too costly. a tyan board for it runs about $450, plus the 1.4 barton starts at like $175 or something.. so i doubt i'll do that.

not going to run sata for now, going to swap over my 80gb wd 8mb 7200 for now. i'm going to drop the wd 36gb sata 10k rpm 8mb cache drive into my current machine. this machine i;m on right now will be my fast & dirty gaming machine, with the sata, corsair xms, ati 9800 256mb and stuff. might even upgrade to a nice barton in the process, on a 2400+ now.

[Khledar]

I'm currently using an IC7 with a couple sticks of Kingston HyperX 3500 - unfortunately not running the 800 Bus.

The ram really takes off in DC as I'm sure you know. I've also done a little video grabbing across the onboard IEEE 1394 and it seems to be quite speedy and reliable - haven't had a real oportunity to test the USB 2.0 though.

I've never had any stability problems, even while OCing.

The IC7 has no onboard NIC, which although isn't a "problem" but with the cost of onboard 10/100 NICs it's kind of suprising. (ofcourse the IC7-G will give you the "Gigalan" NIC)

Mostly things you probably already know just thought I'd drop my 1st hand experience.

[iroc409]

cools. yeah, that firewire video stuff is pretty sweet, especially when you're using a sony cam. fast, and very reliable.


well, here's what i've found so far on duallie amd setups. the mp btw goes up to a 2800, with 266mhz fsb. the opterons start at the 1.4 mark, up to about 1.8.

as far as mainboards go, i've found thus far basically 2 mfrs, msi and tyan.

both have dual opteron/mp boards that are fairly similar as far as features. looks like the opteron boards are around $450, where the mp boards are about $180.

so, in that respect the opteron is quite expensive. so, that makes me wonder if it's really worth it to spend that kinda money on the opteron. although, the preliminary tests of the hammer series are pretty impressive, so i'm sure it'd be pretty fast. maybe even faster than the 2800 mp.

i assume you can throw a 32bit pci card ina 64bit slot? most of these server boards have more 64bit slots than 32's. and what exactly is an "agp pro" slot... i'm figuring they're at 4x, which should be acceptable.

oh yeah, the msi opteron board has onboard 8mb rage video, not cool. no agp slot, either. so that means it's down to the tyan board for an opteron.

i dunno.. that's a pretty expensive setup, i dunno if it's worth it. although i have always wanted a duallie workstation, and they say they can be used for high-end workstations. just hope they can put up with tv tuner/capture cards, firewire, and a sb audigy. hm... crap, i dunno. maybe i should just get another abit board and toss a barton in it

but the pimp factor of running a dual 1.4/1.8 opteron or 2.8 mp would be pretty sweet

what's the deal with these mp processors, anyways? i don't know much about them at the moment...

[iroc409]

oh yeah, and the opteron 1.4 is the only chip i could use right now... the 1.6 and 1.8 are 700-850$... soo yeah, not doing that. the 1.4's are about $240 though, so that's fairly reasonable.


update: found a nice gigabyte mp board, with even onboard sound and usb...

[ymboc]

Most of the MP boards I have seen have 2 64bit slots and the remaining (3?) are PCI... but I'm sure you've noticed that yourself... 32bit PCI cards should work in a 64bit slot, at least on the servers I've worked on (which had all 64bit slots).

AGP Pro is used by the fancier 'workstation class' videocards... It was my understanding that it's basically an extra connector at the front of the slot that allows more power to be delivered to the videocard... so you could even have an AGP8x AGP Pro slot, but all I've seen so far is AGP4x

Regardless.. here's the spec: http://www.agpforum.org/downloads/apro_r11a.pdf

When picking Processors for an MP system... don't rule out the 2500XPs (since they're barton too) and considerably cheaper than the 2800s... btw, you do know about the L5 'mod' right?

[iroc409]

Originally posted by ymboc
Most of the MP boards I have seen have 2 64bit slots and the remaining (3?) are PCI... but I'm sure you've noticed that yourself... 32bit PCI cards should work in a 64bit slot, at least on the servers I've worked on (which had all 64bit slots).

AGP Pro is used by the fancier 'workstation class' videocards... It was my understanding that it's basically an extra connector at the front of the slot that allows more power to be delivered to the videocard... so you could even have an AGP8x AGP Pro slot, but all I've seen so far is AGP4x

Regardless.. here's the spec: http://www.agpforum.org/downloads/apro_r11a.pdf

When picking Processors for an MP system... don't rule out the 2500XPs (since they're barton too) and considerably cheaper than the 2800s... btw, you do know about the L5 'mod' right?

cool... thanks for the info. 4x agp would probably be acceptable.. i haven't found exact specs, they just say "agp pro".

i;ve _heard_ of the L5 mod, just not how to do it.

i was thinking about using xp 2400's, because i already have one in this machine. this machine will become my gaming machine, so i thought maybe throw in a 3000 or 3200 barton in this, and use the 2400 in the new machine.

i assume the barton works fine in the 266fsb boards? basically i'm looking between the gigabyte ga-7dpxdw and the msi k7d master-L. both are even oc'able, but i need stability here so i probably won't see that.

would i really notice a big difference with between the non-bartons and the bartons? not sure if it's going to be worth it or not, but the 2500's shouldn't be that bad of a hit to upgrade, i can always use this chip in a server or *nix station.

[ymboc]

The most significant difference between the Bartons and the TBreds is the 256k extra cache they have on chip (total 512k)... which is pretty usefull for a workstation/server.... That's why I'd suggest you take a good long look at those... (EDIT: Barton XP/MPs should work in at least the MSI MP board as the 2800 is listed in their supported CPU list)

While I tend to like gigabyte boards, I'd reevaluate on their MP board as it seems that they havent released a bios update to make their boards compatible with the Barton CPUs - They might have in their Tbred update, but no mention is made and they dont appear to have a supported CPU list for their workstation/server boards.

Another thing I can say in favour of the MSI MP board.... is that it's rather popular.

EDIT2: Forgot to mention, as it was kind of implied... the 2800MP (Barton) runs at 266mhz, while the XP Bartons run at 333mhz. So if you get an XP you have to unlock/change the multiplier to get equivalent 2500/2800 performance. The linked L5 article goes into this.

[iroc409]

good info... i appreciate it.


so basically if i do a dual xp setup, i have to get something like the msi or gigabyte, because those boards are overclockable/tweakable, and it sounds as if the others are not.

this is necessary because the barton xp's have to be de-tuned to 266fsb, right? will this affect their stability, and most importantly, win xp's stability?

the gigabyte was nice because of the onboard raid, but that's really not a necessity, and i believe they are both available with onboard gigabit ethernet.

[satanicoo]

If you are looking for Video editing lke you said, nothing beats a P4.
Rdram? it could be good, if everione didnt abandoned her, so with a chipset with almoust 3 years, it has been surpassed by DDR+Canterwood.

How about a dual P4+ HT?

[iroc409]

Originally posted by satanicoo
If you are looking for Video editing lke you said, nothing beats a P4.
Rdram? it could be good, if everione didnt abandoned her, so with a chipset with almoust 3 years, it has been surpassed by DDR+Canterwood.

How about a dual P4+ HT?

that's kindof what i was thinking, dual p4 with HT.

now i'm kinda thinking an msi with dual barton 2500's @2.25.. says it's doable, and mostly stable. and it can be done for like the price of a good xeon motherboard.

i'm not going to be doing major video editing right now, mostly i just have to edit 5 minute clips into 3 minute clips, nothing major. down the road i will need more, but that's i guess when i spend $3000 on a good video editing dedicated machine. this is mostly for design right now, and a little vid editing.

i can build a pretty sweet setup for what i need for around $1000 or so, dual amd, and then upgrade my gaming machine to what i want for another $500 or so, i should be good to go.

now if i can just dig up an extra $4k for flat panels

[ymboc]

Originally posted by iroc409
this is necessary because the barton xp's have to be de-tuned to 266fsb, right? will this affect their stability, and most importantly, win xp's stability?

Stability (presumably) shouldn't be affected by running a 333fsb capable chip at 266fsb... and in the end after increasing the multiplier to match the lower fsb while still achieving the same CPU Mhz... you're still running at the same speed you were before - just slower fsb.

I would suggest you go out and get a big beefy powersupply though... on the order of 500/550 Watts (antec trupower comes to mind). If you read the linked L5 article you'll notice that they say that the stock HSF isnt up to the task either anymore... so things to think about...

On the topic of the P4 being the end all of video editing... is it really that much better that it is faster than a dual proc machine?!?! (I doubt it personally but feel free to re-educate me). And dual p4? when did that happen? was that some unreleased via mb design or something?

While we're at it...
Are there any 64bit PCI video editing cards that are reasonably priced?

[iroc409]

xeon is the SMP p4.. same thing, just more expensive

anyways, yeah i was going to probably do like a 550 or 650w psu to make sure, and i'm thinking about even watercooling this rig. i figrue, why the hell not, might cut down a little on the noise factor.


i dunno about any 64bit video editing card... i just use regular capture cards or firewire. mostly firewire. then again, i'm usually just editing someone else's clips at the moment, what little i'm doing. but it takes a lot of time to convert stuff, and compress and such.

plus, photoshop is multithreading

[ymboc]

... I've been re-reading the thread.... noticed you mentioned that you intend to go with a raid 5... anyway, a while back I was reading the merits of raid 0 + 1 over raid 5 at storagereview...

I'm not sure where over there it was, but surely its something to look into... there may have been significant threads on the topic here too as I could have sworn seeing someone here ramble on how raid 0 + 1 is so much better

EDIT: StorageReview Raid Info Note that raid 0 + 1 is aparantly called raid 01 (and simularily 1 + 0 is called raid 10). While the link is to the sumary comparison table, it might be a good idea to read the individual writeups on raid 5 & raid 01/10 as they contain aditional usefull info (particularily on how raid 10 is better in some ways that raid 01)

[iroc409]

hrm, interesting, i'll have to check that out. really, all i need is raid stripping, because the only reason i'd be running raid in this box is for video editing and stuff, so it's just a speed booster.

[Tweekster]

Thought I would chime in.......a day late and a dollar short

If you want a budget dualie, go AMD with a MSI board and a couple of modded 2500 Bartons....get ECC RAM and a 550W PS.

If you want rock solid stability, go dual Xeon with an E7505 chipset......2.4/533 procs are about $240 each, which is reasonable, the motherboard is the killer, $400+......also the 24 pin EPS power supply is a little high.

When your doing video compressions with a multi-threaded app like TMPGenc, the dual Xeons with HT just scream. A full 2 pass DVD quality compression on a full DVD worth of video takes me about 2 hours.

Reconsider the SX4000......I've used this card on 2 machines with bad results, corrupted arrays, funny quirks, bad initial bios.......look at the latest descriptions on the bios updates on the Promise site, scary stuff.........finally returned them both and switched to 3Ware Escalades........problem free

Raid 5 has terrible write speeds, not too good for video capture, stick with Raid 0 or Raid 10........or a single 15K SCSI

[MadHacker]

For <my 2 cents worth>.
I recomend Gigabyte 8KNXP (875P)
good rock solid board.

Also Toms Hardware did a review on 24 boards and gave it

THG is going to present one award per chipset in this large comparative test. Out of all the test participants, the Gigabyte GA-8KNXP offers the best equipment (high quality components), innovative features and high performance at a reasonable price. The broad range of extra equipment would cost about $50 at a specialty store. Gigabyte therefore receives the sought-after prize from THG.

also Anandtech did a review on the ULTRA version as well.
rated very well.

I will be buying a P4 2.8 Ghz 800MhzFSB system with the 8KNXP board end of this month.

</my 2 cents worth>.

[Brad]

toms hardware wouldn't know a motherboard if it hit them in the head. Anand are very good, but they haven't tested an Asus P4C800-E yet....

[MadHacker]

In the last 2 years i have RMA'd 3 Asus boards.
they use to be very good boards but their Quality Control must have gone to the $hitt$....
never had a problem with Abit or Gigabyte.

I'll never buy an ASUS again....