The Serpent Rider wrote on 2022-05-21, 01:20:
To summarize: mediocre board.
If you want to run a Frankenstein Core 2 Duo DDR1/AGP PC then yeah, the AS8-V is not very interesting but OP wants to build a Pentium 4 system:
WallpaperDesigner wrote on 2018-03-16, 17:40:
I'm looking to pair it with an LGA 775 P4.
The only possible downside I can see to ICH5 I can see is the fact that it lacks ATA133 support, but it makes up for it by having SATA. Only 4 PCI slots are more then enough for most. I use one for a sound card (Creative Sound Blaster LIVE!) and the rest are free. The board has on board LAN witch works fine under win98 and XP. No need for a SATA PCI controller unless you want SATA-2. Maybe for RAID or SCSI? That would eat up another PCI slot. Then let's say you add a wifi card - one with win98 drivers - but those are few and far between - and painfully slow. Not to mention they offer no advantage over a USB 2.0 wifi card in a configuration like this... And I'm out of ideas regarding PCI expansion cards....
[EDITED] VOODOO 2 CARDS!!! A pair of these would take up 2 slots + the sound card, and the 4th slot is right under the AGP card making it useless unless you want to suffocate the GPU. I guess you could use a low profile PCI card in there without choking the AGP card. Or one could use a Voodoo 3 PCI and save another PCI slot - you just gave me an idea! I'm gonna try and build a win9x / winXP dual boot PC with one of my spare AS8-V boards, a pentium 4 640, a geforce FX5900 Ultra and a Voodoo 3 PCI - that might be fun!!!
As for bad caps - 90% of boards from that time frame suffer from capacitor plague, including the GA-8I865GME-775, ASRock ConRoe865PE and ASRock 4CoreDual-SATA2. The latter also suffers from poor quality FETs. The only ones not prone to bad caps are newly made Asrock 775i65G, but it doesn't compare to the Abit in layout and features. 3 PCI slots, only 2 are really usable - basic bios and little to no overclocking compared to the Abit, and it uses the same ICH5 SB.
Also I'd like to add - regarding the Core 2 Duo in i865 chipset boards discussion - I've played around with these a few years ago and I didn't like the results. Sure, it is possible, but the resulting build is far from stable, especially in wi9x - AND - my only logical reasoning for running a intel 865 chipset board is it's excellent win9x drivers and support. In fact I never managed to install win9x using my 4CoreDual-SATA2 with a e6600. I tried everything - disable SATA, drop down to 512Mb of ram, update bios, unnoficial bios, recap, MOSFET upgrade, you name it. I managed to get win98 installed after switching to a pentium D 945 - after witch I installed PATCHMEM, put 2GB of ram in the board and it worked fine in win98. Then I tried the e6600 again and the PC would lock up while booting '98 - despite it booting just fine in XP. But for XP you can run any LGA775 motherboard including late x48 and nforce 780i, so why bother?