I'm on the lookout for a socket 478 mATX motherboard, since my ASRock P4i65G is proving to be a little more temperamental than I would like it to 🤣 . Any recommendations? I tend to avoid i845 motherboards when I can grab i865, but I might give it a second thought if a good board comes up.
wrote:I'm on the lookout for a socket 478 mATX motherboard, since my ASRock P4i65G is proving to be a little more temperamental than I would like it to 🤣 . Any recommendations? I tend to avoid i845 motherboards when I can grab i865, but I might give it a second thought if a good board comes up.
Given uATX boards tend to be somewhat thinner on the ground than full ATX, unless you have lots to choose from, go for the first one that comes by and meets your minmal requirements.
Given you mention i865 and i845 I'm assuming you have DDR1-SDRAM and AGP video to go with it. In that case I personally like the SiS So478 chipsets. The 648 and 648FX perform better than the i845D/G, have solid stability and good I/O. The 655 and 655FX add dual channel support, which improves performance even more - if not to i865 levels. If no i865 is availabe they are very decent second choices and were used quite a lot on OEM boards (which is what most uATX boards tend to be).
Yeah, I am considering other options as well, such as the SiS chipsets you mentioned. This ASRock board has been nothing but headaches unfortunately, although I am trying to see if I can get it stable somehow.
Im in the middle of a build based on a Intel D845gerg2. Its a solid board and given me no real problems. Missing the lack of on-board SATA though so this may get swapped out for a board with a SiS 661FX chipset.
Considering a Asus P5S800-VM
What issues are you having with the P4i65G - mine have been rock solid over a number of years (unlike their P4VM900-SATA2 which was an awkward sod). Assuming you don't want to go PCI-E (I've used both the Asrock & Biostar 945GC boards which were fine) then the best matx 478/ AGP board I've used (still use it in my old video capture / transfer rig) is the rev 1.x Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000MK (865PE chipset)
P4i945GC ?
Or is AGP a requirement ?
I had some issues trying to set up the following system:
Pentium 4 Northwood-HT 3.0GHz
2x512MB DDR1
ASRock P4i65G
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra
SB Audigy 1
WD Digital 160GB SATA
DVDRW SATA
Well, the idea was to use SATA for everything since it is convenient, hard drives are newer and more reliable and cables are far less thick and intrusive. I ran into some trouble trying to do that, weird hangs, XP installation hanging and other oddities. In the end, it seems it doesn't want to play nice with my SATA HDD, so I had to resort to IDE. I naturally tried Compatibility Mode for IDE but it didn't change anything unfortunately. I also had some issues with RAM, this was a particularly picky board about which sticks work and which won't. Thankfully, I found a GEIL pair at 400MHz, CL2.5 with some nice blue heatsinks and 1GB is all I want to shoot for because I am dual booting Win98SE.
It seems like everything's working now, so I may have solved the issues, I'll keep you posted 😀.
I managed to get everything running smoothly for the most part. Even got the Audigy DOS drivers to work somewhat under Win98. This'll make a nice high end Win98 system and early WinXP system 😀.
Just to be on the safe side, in case everything decides to go FUBAR, I imaged the entire disk. 🤣
