I am partial towards Asus, but to be quite honest I can't think of a reason why any of those motherboards are necessarily better then the others. The P4P800 is kinda cool in that there is a socket 479 converter out there for running Pentium M's but if your not doing that then there isn't much to differentiate.

MSI P4MAM-L (VIA P4M266)

It would be a waste to use an i865 motherboard with a Northwood Celeron! 😉

While I like the Asus, if your not going to use the "delux" parts seems a bit of a waste.
I'm a fan of Intel chipsets for Intel CPU's so pass on the MSI
Guess I vote for either the Asrock or Gigabyte, The Gigabyte's CIA may be fun to play with?

Asus P4C800 is one of the best 875 chipset board, it has AGP Pro slot, IDE RAID function, and possibility to upgrade to Pentium M CPU with better gaming performance, much lower temperature and power consumption.

P4P800 deluxe does almost the same as a 865 chipset except its AGP slot. and if u want a compact M-ATX board with familiar functions, P4P800-VM is the choice

I would have recommended the MSI had it had the use of a 3.3v agp slot but since it is 1.5v only I suggest one of those Intel boards instead. May as well try to go to the moon overclocking wise as that was what the netburst sluggerons did best, some people have gone past 5ghz on suicide runs.

The real question is, why Celeron? For value, a Northwood-C at 3.4 GHz is like $20. For exotic, there's the P4-EE Gallatin core or a CT-479 with Pentium-M.

I'm partial to Asus with the P4P800-E.

Edit: 3.4-Northwood seems to have gone up in price. But still, a lower spec Northwood-C can't be expensive.

I don't see the point of using a Northwood Celeron either. Socket 478 Celerons are too slow to be useful for anything, and it's not like Pentium 4s are expensive nowadays.

dexvx wrote:

The real question is, why Celeron? For value, a Northwood-C at 3.4 GHz is like $20. For exotic, there's the P4-EE Gallatin core or a CT-479 with Pentium-M.

I'm partial to Asus with the P4P800-E.

Edit: 3.4-Northwood seems to have gone up in price. But still, a lower spec Northwood-C can't be expensive.

Celeron was quite common back in the days in my town, so I'd want to make a build that is nearly period correct using a 478 motherboard.

nforce4max - don't worry - for my overclocking needs I can always count on my P4 2.4GHz (Prescott core, SL7E8) or the monster that my P4 HT 3GHz is.

chinny22 - considering this is going to be a period correct machine, this means:
-no SATA drives (I can use SATA-capable motherboards, it's just that SATA HDDs weren't that common here - believe me, I've seen such stuff)
-no fancy features (like ASUS' POST voice, IEEE1394, GbE LAN, and even RAID chipsets)
-entry or mid-end GPU (I was thinking that the 9600SE might be a good match, but might consider a FX5500 as well)
-Windows XP SP3 ( I know this might not be period correct but I actually want some bit of protection, as small as it would be.)

In the end, I might go with the ASRock,since the Gigabyte doesn't have onboard LAN. (like the MSI and ASUS and this ASRock have)