Very nice build! I really appreciate the attention to detail and the fact that you’re going for the maximum i850E can offer—PC1066 and the 3.06GHz Northwood. Very, very cool! I’ve actually been planning a very similar build using the same board. The D850EMV2 is pretty awesome, being quite stable and very fast for what it is. Considering the NEC USB 2.0 and built-in Intel LAN, you really can’t go wrong!
The heat situation with PC1066 is unsurprising but also somewhat annoying; I think the performance difference might be worth it though. I think that the i850E on the whole chipset is a bit underrated. Compared to an SiS645DX, VIA P4X266, or even the i845D, it’s significantly faster, whilst retaining Windows 9x compatibility (if so desired), and offering greater memory bandwidth at the same time. There’s no doubt that the later i865 and i875 are probably more interesting to most people—being mainstream DDR parts and all—but the i850E has a charm to it that’s unmistakable. This board seems to be one of the few to come equipped with this chipset and one of the few to also support PC1066; 533MHz FSB and 533MHz DDR RDRAM is a pretty potent combination, and a strange one for sure!
I much prefer this board to the ASUS P4T533, since you avoid the whole 32-bit RDRAM situation. While cool, like flupke11 noted, there’s difficulty in sourcing larger-sized PC4200 RIMMs and there’s really no advantages to 32-bit RDRAM since it’s basically two 16-bit RIMMs glued together. To that end, boards like the P4T533-C probably make more sense convenience-wise, but 32-bit RIMMs are undoubtedly very neat and quirky.
Have you tested your system in any contemporary games? I’d be curious to see how that Quadro FX flexes its muscles with that 3.06GHz Pentium 4 at the helm.
Awesome job on this one!
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