New Motherboard

[dbdg]

Just about to buy a new P4 2.66/2.53. (Hopefully enough power for the 9700Pro)

Any suggestions on a motherboard?

Currently using a Supermicro P4SDA+ with my 1.8 and been very happy with it but I can't seem to find another decent single chip Supermicro board.

Overclocking etc not really much of a concern, just interested in pure stability.

[K6-III]

Personally, I'd go with either SIS655 or Granite Bay.....

[dbdg]

Are the Granite Bay boards even out yet? can't seem to find one here in the UK.

Haven't looked at any SIS655 yet.

[DGhost]

Granite Bay boards will provide excellent performance but are rediculously expensive. How much of a factor is cost?

[dbdg]

For the board cost is not really that much of a factor, as long as we aren't talking £400+.

[BuddMan]

That's the only thing I'm waiting for on my system is Granite Bay board. They haven't come out yet, but it shouldn't be too long as I've seen many reviews about the ASUS and Gigabyte ones.

[DGhost]

I've heard of a couple vendors refusing to sell granite bay boards because 1) intel is fairly late to market with it, 2) price is fairly high, 3) performance, while improved, does not justify the price tag...

that being said, until they are shipping, dunno about the price and how high itw ill be...

[BuddMan]

Performance is on par with Rambus, so I don't see how you could say price doesn't justify performance as it's much cheaper than a Rambus config.

[WyWyWyWy]

Hmm... is there a definite need to upgrade from 1.8 to 2.53?
And, if yours is a 1.8a you can probably OC it to 2.4 at least anyway.

[dbdg]

I am a 3D artist so any extra power is always good.

Plus my mate gets my 1.8 and our server gets upgraded, always worth it. Pretty sure it is an a, its 478pin.

Might not go for a 2.53 just seems the best option at the moment for the price. Starts to sky rocket a bit after that.

[DGhost]

Originally posted by BuddMan
Performance is on par with Rambus, so I don't see how you could say price doesn't justify performance as it's much cheaper than a Rambus config.

Not so. Implementing dual channel DDR memory support would cost a lot more than implementing dual channel RDRAM (ie, the i850 chipset).

Granite Bay as a chipset will be more expensive than the i850 because of the complexities of a dual channel memory controller plus the cost of extra pins on the chipset, and it will take more expensive board designs in order to implement it because you literally have to double the number of traces required for memory. Plus, as the number of traces required increases the boards become increasingly difficult to design and implement correctly.

If Granite Bay motherboards are cheaper than i850 motherboards it will be for one reason: Intel wants everyone to adopt it. And they would have to be very aggressive with chipset pricing, something that Intel doesn't ever particularly do, especially with performance chipsets.

And last i checked the performance was *only* on par with the i850E.

WyWyWyWy - overclocking is bad to do for production systems.

[K6-III]

SIS655, on the other hand.....

[Wombat]

DGhost, you're right about having more traces, but Rambus is much more stringent about the signal quality due to the speed at which it operates. I guess you could say SDRAM is more "robust." Once you factor in all the quality issues, Rambus is probably still easier, but it's certainly not an easy win.

[DGhost]

True, i had forgotten that RDRAM runs at a much higher clockrate and that it would impact the requirements for signal quality and probably trace lengths. that certainly does balance that stuff out...

SiS will probably win out the dual channel wars just because they will price it at an incredibly low price. And it probably will be faster.

Wombat... could the extra traces required for Dual DDR channels lead to interferance at higher clock speeds? just curious if this would be why Intel has not validated Granite Bay for DDR333 operation...

[Wombat]

That could be. But I don't know much about this board. I just haven't cared to look into it. I wouldn't be so quick to think it's the board timings though. It could be the bus drivers on the chip itself. The traces required for that much memory at that speed aren't really <I>that</I> bad.

Intel is very conservative about their ratings, it's a very cover-your-ass culture. I've heard from motherboard people that say if you follow all of the specs Intel gave you for implementing Rambus on your motherboard, it would be physically impossible, because you'd have negative timing margins all over.

We'll see how SiS does at the dual-channel thing. HP and Intel both have a good bit of dual-channel experience though, since Itanium has had a 128-bit data bus.