kanecvr wrote:Asus i865 socket 478 boards suffer from "sudden inexplicable death syndrome" I have like 5-6 dead boards in my parts box. Performance on their boards is unremarkable, with the exception of the P4C800 Deluxe witch is pretty fast. As for MSI - as much as I love their current boards, socket 478 and early LGA775 boards made by them are crap, with a few rare exceptions. The NEO2 series is fast but not reliable (VRM's tend to POP when used with fast CPUs). They're only reliable board is the NEO-FISR2. Good OC features too, but useless when your board pops a VRM. As reliability and performance go, Gigabyte boards are hit and miss, but feature wise the're unremarkable.
As for all retro rigs, I recommend ABIT boards. Look for an ABIT IS7, IC7 or AI7 - you can't go wrong with those. Great features, reliability and performance.
MSI 865PE Neo2-L boards don't pop VRMs. At least my old one came with a P4 3.0GHz HT Prescott,and it was sure fun. VRMs weren't even hot. It was quite poorly recapped (few original OST caps still there,but two of them were replaced by Samwha RDs.) and I had to remove one or two popped Nichicons. Other than that,it was rock stable. One little quirk was it couldn't save CMOS,but I blame myself for not having a CR2032 battery handy. I had a breadboard system built out of it when I went on a trip (all the parts,except the PSU which I put somewhere else,were put into a briefcase.
Here are the specs of what it consisted of:
MSI 865PE Neo2-L
Pentium 4 HT 3.0GHz 478
Radeon HD3450 512MB GPU - pretty fitting with the red theme 🤣
FSP FSP300-60GTP PSU - recapped too,bulging 5vsb cap and a few ones also bulging on the secondary - it worked fine afterwards.
80GB WDC WD800JB-60LSA5 SATA HDD
TSSTCorp/HP TS-H492C DVD-ROM
512MB RAM - not really sure,I think I had more but I could be wrong
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS/Windows 7 Ultimate dualboot
no case.
"Enter at your own peril, past the bolted door..."
Main PC: i5 3470, GB B75M-D3H, 16GB RAM, 2x1TB
98SE : P3 650, Soyo SY-6BA+IV, 384MB RAM, 80GB