August Extreme Gaming PC Buyer's Guide - Page 3

Motherboards

Intel Motherboard: ASUS P4T533 i850E

Current Cost: $178
Months on list: New
Price Change: N/A

Choosing the right motherboard is always tough, especially for a Pentium 4 platform. With many Pentium 4 DDR chipsets coming close to the performance of Intel 850E RDRAM-based boards, the decision to go with the Asus P4T533C was a tough one to make. Then again, this is an Extreme Buyer's Guide, so if we build it, it will run... and fast. We went with an RDRAM motherboard and this is one heck of a motherboard at that. The P4T533-C is built with legendary ASUS quality, Intel's 850E chipset with 533 MHz FSB support, 2 RIMM 4200 slots for up to 2GB of 1066 MHz RDRAM, 1 AGP 4X slot, 6 PCI slots, and 4 USB 2.0 ports. Naturally there are two IDE ports supporting up to 4 IDE drives supporting ATA-100 (with optional ATA133 RAID).

This board also has some nice convenience features, such as the ASUS EZ Flash, which enables you to update your BIOS without booting to DOS. The motherboard also comes with the Post Reporter feature that quite literally tells you about problems and solutions via an onboard IC voice chip. Most importantly though, the motherboard supports the 533 MHz FSB that is required by the Intel Pentium 4, 2.53 GHz CPU, and gives the option of 1066 MHz RDRAM for maximum memory and system performance.

AMD Motherboard: ASUS A7V333-RAID KT333

Current Cost: $145
Months on list: New
Price Change: N/A

Picking the right memory platform for the Athlon XP system is a bit easier, as DDR rules the roost for high-end AMD platforms. Actually selecting the DDR chipset, and then the specific motherboard, was a bit tougher task. There are compelling products such as the SiS 745, the NVIDIA nForce, as well as the popular VIA KT333. Overall, the KT333 offers the best mix of power, polish and stability, and for an extreme gaming system, the ASUS A7V333-RAID motherboard is a fairly easy choice to make. We tailor our component choices to the specific guide, and the overclockability, performance and wide range of on-board features make the ASUS 17V333-RAID fit like a glove in our extreme system.

The A7V333-RAID, has everything but the kitchen sink, with one AGP Pro and five PCI slots, two ATA-133 ports, and a Promise 20276 ATA 133 RAID controller supporting RAID 0/1 functionality. For memory expansion, the A7V333-RAID features three DDR DIMM sockets supporting PC2700/2100/1600, and the maximum memory capacity is 3GB. Additionally, it has a single IEEE 1394 port for a single Firewire device. For increased connectivity, there is a USB 2.0 controller that allows up to four USB 2.0 devices to be attached, as well as a USB 1.1 controller for up to four devices. The A7V333-RAID certainly offers all the connections that an extreme user will need, and in addition to that, the motherboard has some useful features, such as the C.O.P (CPU overheating protection) feature that shuts off the machine when temperatures rise high enough to damage the system. If you're interested in overclocking, you can do it easily in the BIOS through the Stepless Frequency Selection option.