Help chosing a motherboard

[skeet]

Hi there, Skeet here, work question help please.
I will hand over to my learned friend, Barry the Greek, with our problem...

Hi...Barry the Greek here. I need some help building an Avid DVexpress system and would like your recommendations on a suitable motherboard. I want to run a P4 2.4G (Avid recommendation) 512 DDR (DDR the best). No onboard sound or video. What is the best quality/price available at the moment.

 

[Mercutio]

Given the nature of the application, I'd give some consideration to a genuine Intel board rather than some other OEM. The D845GEBV2 does most of what you want, but it has audio and LAN on-board (and 6 PCI slots - are you going to install any DSP 'boards for accelerating your editing?). It also supports DDR333. More memory bandwidth is always good when editing video.

 

[Corvair]

Hi there, Skeet here, work question help please.
I will hand over to my learned friend, Barry the Greek, with our problem...

Hi...Barry the Greek here. I need some help building an Avid DVexpress system and would like your recommendations on a suitable motherboard. I want to run a P4 2.4G (Avid recommendation) 512 DDR (DDR the best). No onboard sound or video. What is the best quality/price available at the moment.

Not exactly the low-price leader, instead one of the most highly refined brands of mobo for the technical marketplace are the Supermicro workstation mobos.

What I've been using to build media workstations lately has been the Supermicro P6SGA.

¤ Single Intel Pentium 4 up to 3.06GHz
¤ Intel 845G chipset
¤ Up to 2GB of DDR memory
¤ 533 MHz Front Side Bus
¤ ATX form factor
¤ AGP 4X
¤ 5 USB 2 (and 1.1) ports

http://www.supermicro.com/PRODUCT/MotherBoards/845/P4SGA.htm


The P4SGA does have onboard graphics, audio, and LAN, but any or all of these are easily defeated. I defeated the onboard graphics and audio, replacing them with a Matrox G-550 AGP graphics adaptor and one or another high-end multichannel audio board with digital (SPDI/F, AES-EBU, and/or ADAT lightpipe) and analogue audio I/O. Motion video hardware PCI add-ins are Matrox RT X.10, which is designed to harness the computational power of modern P4 processors.

Other PCI add-ins are Adaptec or LSI Logic dual-channel U-160 SCSI adaptor and a dual-channel Acard ATA-133 adaptor which provides additional ATA channels (beyond the 2 on the mobo) for DVD+R/W, Zip, and hard drive.

Storage: Seagate 18GB X-15 for rapid boot-up and application performance -- mounted in an air-cooled hot-plug carrier, and 1 or 2 Seagate Barracuda ATA IV hard drives also mounted in air-cooled hot-plug carriers for cheap *quiet* removable mass storage that can allow copying between 2 removable Barracuda ATA IV drives. System can boot on either a Barracuda ATA IV or X-15. With this setup, a user can have several "archive" ATA drives as well as a mix of Win9x/NT/2K/XP or Unix/Linux boot drives and data drives; it's all plug-n-play.

For the chassis I use the Supermicro SC-762 chassis with the 420W redundant-cooling power supply designed for use with all high-GHz P4 processors.

Monitor (or multiple monitors):

Either the Mitubishi DP-2060U, DP-2070U, or DP-2060U Spectraview calibrating 22-inch monitor:

If you are into dual-Xeon action:

...much the same as the P4SGA, including 533 MHz FSB, but with support for up to 12GB of DDR-RAM, PCI-X slots, and Gb Ethernet.

http://www.supermicro.com/PRODUCT/MotherBoards/E7505/X5DAE.htm


http://www.supermicro.co.uk/

http://www.supermicro.ru/
http://www.supermicro.de/
http://www.supermicro.at/
http://www.supermicro.nl/
http://www.super-micro.es/

 

[James]

Tyan boards are very nice indeed, I'll vouch for them.

If your budget doesn't extend quite that far, I've been very happy with my Gigabyte GA-8SG667 and a P4 2.4G. The processor, RAM and PCI slots are all independently clocked if you need to push performance in one area over the others. The board is very stable and rather alarmingly cheap for what you get. It has no onboard LAN or video, but I think you get onboard sound whether you like it or not (I didn't, so I switched it off). I think there is a version with LAN onboard but don't quote me on that. No fan on the Northbridge which is a good thing too, and there are tons of USB2 ports available.

Minus side is that it is a SiS648 chipset so you won't be able to take advantage of hyperthreading. The AGP slot is 8x but it won't support 2x boards, says Gigabyte. Not all 400Mhz DDR RAM works in it - I bought a single Winbond 512M stick which is on their unofficial approved list and I can't get it to work reliably at 400MHz, so it's at 365MHz for the moment.

 

[Mercutio]

That SuperMicro case does have a down side, Gary. It's unusually loud, even for a "server-type" enclosure.

Tyan can be hit or miss. Stability is always good, but sometimes they release absolute dogs. Hard telling which ones are which sometimes, especially for their workstation-ish boards.

 

[CougTek]

For a common, no fancy toys, stable and reliable Pentium 4 motherboard, you can't go wrong with the GigaByte GA-8PE667. No onboard LAN/RAID/video, just an integrated Realtek 6-channel chip. You won't find much boards these days without integrated audio.

The SuperMicro Gary pointed out is certainly great purely from a stability point of view, but it is based on an older chipset than the GA-8PE667 and it includes onboard graphics, which is somewhat of a waste if you don't use it. The i845PE chipset from Intel officially supports PC2700 memory (DDR333) unlike the i845G which only supports it unofficially. Plus, IIRC, Hyperthreading will be supported by it. Not sure about the i845G. No offence Gary.

The 8GS667 from GigaBytes isn't a bad choice either, but the IDE connectors can be a problem if you intend to use this board in a tall enclosure since they are loccated at the bottom of the PCB. The SiS648 is faster than the i845PE when using DDR400 memory, but slower when both are using DDR333 RAM. I think the price difference between them is around 10-15U$. Your wallet, your choice.

 

[CougTek]

Damn, I'm too used to the GA-8PE667 Pro's layout. The non-Pro GA-8PE667 also has an awkward location for the IDE connectors. Sure you don't want an onboard Intel Pro100 LAN?