Re: My P4T533 died last night .... building a Conroe system with Gigabyte rather than Asus

In article <44fb6e52$0$20417$4c368faf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Barry Watzman
<WatzmanNOSPAM@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

My p4T533 system died last night. Was able to determine it's the
motherboard. Pretty sure it's out of warranty (December 2002 mfgr. date).

I was in the process of building a Conroe (Core 2 Duo ... but Conroe is
shorter) system anyway. Have about half of the parts, but had not made
a final decision on the motherboard. Of course, this forced that issue.
My "short list" was:

-Asus P5B
-Gigabyte GA-965P DS3
-MSI P965 Neo-F

[There was one other longshot contender, the MSI 975X platinum.]

In the end, I ordered the GA-965P. These boards are all very similar
(all of them are Intel 965 chipsets with ICH8 and an added JMicron
controller). The thing that really swung me against the P5B in the end
was that the RS-232 serial port was not brought out to the rear [AND
while there is a socket for it on the motherboard, Asus doesn't even
give you the Dongle to put the socket into an expansion slot].

In truth, I don't like any of the existing boards. What I want is a
board with:

-A floppy controller that supports two floppy drives
-An IDE controller with 2 IDE ports (4 drives)
-A serial port (preferably 2) brought out to the back
-I'm not using onboard audio, rather a high-end sound card, so I'd trade
onboard audio for a 4th PCI slot

Unfortunately, no one currently makes such a board, all of the
motherboard makers are in too much of a rush to do away with every type
of legacy device (floppy, IDE, serial and in some cases even parallel
printer ports).

My biggest concern with the GA-965P is apparently the early BIOS
versions (which I'm likely to get) won't work with most DDR2 800MHz
memory ... sometimes you have to buy an older, slower, lower voltage
memory module just to do the bios upgrade to the latest bios (which
apparently doesn't have this problem). I'll know in a week or so.

One thing to note about the ICH8. It comes in four models, and
the "base" ICH8 supports only four SATA ports and the Intel
Matrix software will not run RAID modes on it. (That is according
to a table in the ICH8 data*** from Intel.) Even though RAID on
Intel is soft RAID, and they could easily have supported RAID 0/1/5
on a four port chip. The other three models of ICH8 ("ICH8R") have
six SATA ports and will run the Intel Matrix software. You probably
don't care about RAID, and running RAID5 on a motherboard interface
kinda sucks anyway. This is one reason to shop carefully, as there
seem to be more boards shipping with the "base" ICH8, than with the
more functional types.

Many floppy controllers still have the hardware signals to support
two floppies. The brain dead BIOS interface is what is preventing
the second one from being used. Perhaps there are some Super I/O
chips that have the necessary few signals snipped on them, but
I doubt it. In some cases, with signal multiplexing on the
Super I/O, if one interface type was enabled, it meant sacrificing
the functionality of some other interface, but as IRDA headers
and the like are no longer provided, I doubt that is the problem.

The serial port can be fixed with a PCI serial port card.

The IDE controller can be fixed with a Promise card.

HTH,
Paul
.