October 2002 Extreme Gaming PC Buyer's Guide - Page 3

Motherboard

Intel Motherboard: Asus P4T533-C i850E

Current Cost: $169
Months on list: 2
Price Change: -$9

Choosing the right motherboard is always tough. With many DDR based chipsets coming close to the performance of an Intel 850E/RDRAM combo, the decision to go with the Asus P4T533C was a tough one to make. However, since this is an Extreme buyer's guide, we went with a PC1066 RDRAM motherboard and this is one heck of a motherboard at that. It is built with legendary Asus quality, Intel's 850E chipset with 533 MHz FSB support, 4 RIMM slots for up to 2GB of 1066 MHz RDRAM, 1 AGP 4X slot, 5 PCI slots, and 4 USB 2.0 ports. Naturally there are two IDE ports supporting up to 4 IDE drives, supporting Ultra DMA 100/66.

There are also some nice convenience features on the motherboard, such as ASUS' EZ Flash, which enables you to update your BIOS without having to resort to the old method of using a DOS based utility and a bootable floppy disk. 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, 2.8 GHz CPU, and it also supports 1066 MHz RDRAM for the absolute maximum memory performance.

AMD Motherboard: Asus A7V8X VIA KT400

Current Cost: $150
Months on list: New
Price Change: N/A

Unlike the previous Extreme guide, this edition suffered less uncertainty in terms of the chipset to seek out. VIA's KT400 chipset is their most polished attempt at creating a stable and high-performance AMD platform. ASUS has stepped up to the plate as one of the first companies to release a product based on VIA's newest AMD Athlon chipset. The ASUS A7V8X has a plethora of features to keep the Extreme user happy, and with ASUS' renowned quality and performance, this motherboard will surely not disappoint.

Starting off with the VIA KT400 chipset, the A7V8X comes with an AGP 8X port, 3 DIMM sockets supporting up to 3GB of DDR, and it also has support for DDR 400 DIMM (limited to two banks, DDR333 can use 4 banks though). The A7V8X has onboard Gigabit LAN capability, Serial ATA support, on-board sound with 5.1 audio support. Additionally, it has a dual IEEE 1394 port for a pair of fire wire devices. For increased connectivity, there is a USB 2.0 controller that allows up to six USB 2.0 devices to be attached. Flexibility is the key with this motherboard, and it can run RAID mode 0, or 1, with the standard ATA interface, or the Serial ATA interface. The A7V8X 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 increase 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.