IMO, for your first P4 experience, I would get a motherboard with Intel chipset.

Asus P4C800(-E) is the only Pentium 4 motherboard I can really recommend. It's much faster than the rest of the motherboards at stock speed with all performance options enabled, probably because of Asus trickery with North Bridge latencys.

If you are going to overclock any i875 or i865 motherboard should perform more or less the same, look for one with good VRM circuits.

In a lot of ways, the Pentium 4 WAS that weak. This was one of the eras where AMD was well and truly in the lead, especially for gaming.

A Prescott @ 3.4 is pretty consistently beaten by an A64 3400+ in gaming, and often by lower AMD chips of the era as well.

Intel 865 chipset and a Nortwood CPU is what I would recommend if you are trying P4 for the first time.

Thanks for the info guys!

I'm really not interested in building a P4. I was checking out this post on craigslist:

https://chicago.craigslist.org/wcl/sop/6100976595.html

Mostly, I like the case and it looks like the PSU could be useful after a recap. I was going to offer the guy $10 for it. I was a bit curious if I could make use of the motherboard for a build, but I'll probably just give the motherboard away. I've really got too many old PCs anyway.

I agree with Phil that the i865 is the most robust Socket 478 platform to go with, but I think this ABit board might be an interesting project.

The VIA P4 boards were kind of weird. They sold for a little while for the simple reason that Intel refused to sell a DDR RAM based chipset (because RDRAM was going to be da bomb). Eventually the 845 chipset came out with DDR support, then the 865, but for a little while everyone thought Intel's cheese had slid off their managerial cracker, and VIA P4 boards really didn't look so bad.

I would be curious to know how the PT880 performs, what quirks it might have, and any benefits it might provide regarding backward compatibility. I believe that chipset came out after VIA paid for a license for the Netburst bus protocol.

Fun fact, the Via PT880 chipset was actually used with some early lga775 motherboards as well. It should be fairly stable and trouble free.

gdjacobs wrote:

I agree with Phil that the i865 is the most robust Socket 478 platform to go with, but I think this ABit board might be an interesting project.

I would be curious to know how the PT880 performs, what quirks it might have, and any benefits it might provide regarding backward compatibility. I believe that chipset came out after VIA paid for a license for the Netburst bus protocol.

Agreed. On the A64 I like VIA chipset a lot. It's only their SATA controllers than can be frustrating, though it does depend on board to board.

Hehe, I wonder if that guy on craigslist reads VOGONS. Right after I made my post, he's suddenly disassembled the system and is now parting it out:

https://chicago.craigslist.org/wcl/sop/6100976595.html

https://chicago.craigslist.org/wcl/sop/6110382912.html

No idea what he did with the Linkworld PSU that I wanted. When I made my first post, this was a complete system. Anyway, it's easily 45 minutes away and I'm quickly losing interest in his sale since he started disassembling it.

Besides, I still have an almost-new Antec SL300S with bulging caps, but it will be fine after a recap.