Motherboard for Upgrade?

[Vidgal]

Looking for the best motherboard for my upgrade. I plan to get either an Athlon XP 1900 or a P4 1.7. I will be retaining the guts of my current system (Asus A7V133a ;384 RAM; 98SE; G400-TV) to handle analog capture and act as a second machine to be networked to the new one. I could get a big boot drive and dual boot, but that wouldn’t allow me to have one machine free while another is working. Want to run 2000 on the new box.

Anyway, I am considering the following motherboards and wondering if anyone has an opinion – pro or con -- on any of these boards: Soyo Dragon Ultra – P4 with SIS645 chipset; Soyo Dragon Plus – Athon XP with Via KT266 chipset; MSI KT266 Pro2-RU – Athlon with Via KT266 chipset; MSI 845 Ultra – P4 with Intel 845D chipset; Iwill XP333 – Athlon with AliMagic 1647 chipset.

Is there another board I should consider? I want DDR memory and RAID.

[Damascus]

Tyan Tiger...

[Vidgal]

I'm sure the Tiger is great, but I can't afford a dual processer board right now. Should have specified that I will need to stick with single CPU.

[wkulecz]

www.extremetech.com has some nice motherboard tests

--wally.

[mits]

If you go for AMD XP look for a mb with the latest VIA chipset KT266A. Recently, Tom's hardware (www.tomshardware.com) had a round-up of mb for AMD's XP.

[cal]

you might check this link to nother group. the guy compares the iwill xp333-r with Abit KR7A-RAID. it might give you some ideas.

http://bbs.pcstats.com/beyond3d/messageview.cfm?catid=4&threadid=1796

http://www.ocztech.com/press/2001/dec/21.html

http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2002q1/ocz-pc3000/index.x?pg=1

http://www.theoverclockerzstore.com/product.asp?0=207&1=209&3=74

quick search using google.com and "ocz pc3000 iwill"

if i rember corectly M and acer were working on something agp when the magic1 and the g800 were first talked about



hmmmmmmmmmmmmm..............
g200 2x
g400 4x
newM ?x

how long to wait?????

cal

[Vidgal]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I have been to so many review sites my eyes are crossed. However, I think I have narrowed by choices down to boards with the Intel 845D chipset. My current A7V133 Asus board is stable now and has been for some time, but it took some BIOS revisions and 3 or 4 clean installs to get there. I am trying to keep that machine basically as is with some minor parts swaps, but I think I will try Intel again for the main machine. The current front runners are the MSI 845 Ultra-ARU and the Soyo Fire Dragon. Based on price the MSI board may win. Kind of depends on whether I want PC Club to put together a barebones thing (board, chip, memory, case drive and Win 2k) or whether I want to gather parts from a variety of places for the best prices possible and start the machine from scratch. Is the savings worth the additional time and abuse? Well, if your in the computer video world, guess you have to enjoy some abuse -- right?