First post, by Nemo1985
I'm looking for some suggestions to do a comparison between Pentium 4 chipsets which I will do in the following weeks.
Let's begin with the motherboard list:
- ECS P4S5A-DX+ SiS 645DX / 961B: supports sdram and ddr up to 333, max supported cpu is Pentium 4 3067 533 the first model with HT, but the feature is bugged on this chipset and can't be enabled.
- Gigabyte GA-8ITXE Intel 850 supports rambus (pc800) but cpu with fsb of 400 mhz (with a specific cpu I was able to run it at 133 mhz but it was like a pentium 4 2400).
- Asus P4T533-C Intel 850E fix the "limits" above, rambus pc1066 fsb 133 mhz and ht.
- Intel 865PE Motherboard (if I can find one for cheap performance should be almost the same as i875) if I remember correctly should support ddr up to 333 (or 400?).
- Asus P4C800-E Intel 875 it's the latest 478 intel chipset so it supports "everything".
- Gigabyte GA-8S655FX SiS 655FX / SiS964 (to be confirmed motherboard may not work) was a low cost competitor with the i865pe, again and it supports the latest 478 features.
The limiting factor here seems to be the Gigabyte which only supports 100 as fsb (400 quad pumped) without ht. I remember that with a specific CPU. I think the cpu should be the same for all the mb but i'm Open to suggestions.
Ram: I was thinking to use 512mb of ram (256x2) so motherboards with dual channel will be able to use it and I also have the same amount of ram for both rambus chipsets (I will use pc1066 underclocked for the gigabyte), but open to suggestion, I have to check what I have in my ddr stash, for sure some winbond bh6 (256x2) and some premium ddr overclocked memories. Open to suggestions.
Video card: I was thinking to use a Radeon 9800pro it's pratically the fastest video card I have which is compatible with all the motherboards, going down to a Geforce 4 or 5 makes no sense, I lack the series 6 and 7 from Nvidia.
OS: Windows xp sp3 fully updated.
Benchmarks:
3dmark 2001SE, comanche 4, Serious Sam 2 Demo, SiSoft Sandra 2003. What else?