Stupid P4 chipset question

[Tea]

We almost never sell Intel CPUs anymore. Today, we sold our very first P4 CPU and mainboard ever. We might sell the odd other one over the next few months, might not - it depends on the price-performance equation, which at this stage still favours AMD. In fact at the moment, we are buying:

• A few Duron 850s for next to nothing to use in upgrades and systems where performance is simply a non-issue. Celeron 1000s or 900s would be just as good, but we already have plenty of Socket A boards, so we stay with our usual AMD habit.
  
• Lots of Athlon XP 1800s. Hard to justify buying anything else much at present. The 1900 is in the ballpark, but hardly seems enough of a difference to be worth stocking two different chips.
  
• A very, very few other things, which we only buy in if we have a firm order.

But we do have to list P4s on our pricelist. People never buy them, but they ask about the price quite often. Given that we almost never sell any of them, it's not sensible for me to go reading through reams and reams of electronic paper over at Anand's (or wherever) trying to pick the 1% differences between this model board and that model. (I don't mind doing this with stuff we sell in volume, such as KT266A vs KT333 vs AMD 760 vs SiS 735. Damned if I want to do it for something we sell maybe three a year of though.)

So, the quick and dirty one-page summary please (just because I'm lazy): what is a sensible middle of the road chipset/mainboard to list as our "standard" P4 board?

Needs to be:

• Something that I can re-price from time to time without making phone calls - Gigabyte or Epox are good for me.
  
• Sensibly expandable (insofar as this is possible, given Intel's apalling record for changing platform specs), with no silly restrictions (such as the old Intel TX 128MB RAM limit, for example).
  
• Decent quality and warranty service - again, Gigabyte and Epox are good for me.
  
• Reasonable price - i.e., as cheap as possible without being nasty.
  
• Don't care about extras like RAID, Firewire, USB 2 - if people want these we can price them individually as upgrade options. Don't care what the sound is but prefer that it have something. If we really want good sound then we will be having a stand-alone sound card anyway.

Right now I'm looking at the Gigabyte GA-8IR533 (i845 chipset, 533 FSB, ATA-100, 3X DDR, 4X AGP AC97 sound) which sounds OK to me, and the GA-8SR533 (same specs except SiS 645 chipset). Would either of these fit the bill? Do I need to know about the i845 variations, such as the 845E and the 845G?

Remember, we quite likely won't sell any of these, I just need a "paper product" to avoid leaving ugly gaps in the pricelist.

Thanks guys.

Tea

 

[CougTek]

GigaByte GA-8IGX is probably the best value of any current Pentium 4 motherboards. It also comes with all the cables you need to assemble your system (two IDE cables, one floppy, plus the USB2 extentions). It's not the absolute cheapest if you consider the price of the motherboard as a whole, but once you figure that you get integrated graphic in the north bridge (it's an i845G chipset-based motherboard), 6-channel Realtek ALC650 integrated audio, Intel 10/100 LAN (!) and most overclocking features you can dream of, it's a terrific value. GigaByte has been one of the best (IMO, THE best), Pentium 4 motherboard manufacturer for quite some time now. Reading the reviews at Anandtech and Tom's Hardware (just the numbers, not the comments), their P4 motherboards are always on top. You simply can't go wrong with it. Do some research about this board and you'll see.

The Soltek SL-85ERV also seems to be a good value, although the P4X400 it uses is beaten by the upcoming SiS648 in most benchmarks (the P4X400 is about as fast as the i845G at 333MHz).The 85ERV beated VIA's own motherboard on the same chipset in the sole review I saw comparing the two (I'm talking about the P4PB 400).

 

[Tea]

Thanks Coug, that was a really speedy response. Alas, the 8IGX is roughly twice the price of a good Socket A DDR mainboard (Gigabyte or Epox), 50% more than the two boards I just mentioned, and has on-board graphics, which we don't do unless we absolutely, positively can't avoid it - though I note that it does have an AGP slot. For a small networked machine, sure, but it has costly features that we can't use.

I should imagine that it would make a good, solid system at a reasonable price (once you count in the LAN, the on-board video, the USB 2, and the sound) but it would push up our prices too high - about AU$80 too much. Remember, the aim here isn't to actually build a good system - no-one buys P4 systems from us - but simply to list the system that they don't buy. On the other hand, anything that appears on our price list has to be decent quality - i.e., Gigabyte, Epox, Soltek, and so on - and it's really helpful if it is one that uses components I have instant access to current prices for. I buy quite a few Soltek Athlon boards (DRV5s) but to refresh my Soltek pricing I have to make a phone call. I have Epox and Gigabyte pricing emailed to me regularly - daily if things are changing fast enough to need it.

(Our price list needs re-doing about once a week. As you can imagine, if I start making weekly phone calls for too many of the items on our multi-page pricelist, I'll wind up with a huge time-management problem.)

Sometimes I wish Tannin was real. He could be a big help.

(I am real, you idiot! You are the imaginary one.)

(Huh? I thought ... Oh yeah. Sorry. I got confused.)

 

[JMP]

Tony,

I have been building a fair number of P4 computers lately, the 845E chipset is the one to look at for solid system, don't know much about the Gigabyte versus Epox as I tend to build with ASUS. The 845E supports the 533 bus of the new P4's, has no built in video and if you use the 333 or 400 DDR is quite overclockable. I have built 3 Systems with P4B533 (845E) and about 5 systems with the P4B266 ( 845D) easy installs and no stability problems. My own system is an P4B533 1.8GHz overclocked to 2.2 GHz. Running Stable with no crashes Windows 2000 for about 2 months so far.

Jeff

 

[Tea]

Thanks Jeff.

The thing that is confusing me is that I thought the 845E was the chipset that did the 533 FSB, but I see the plain 845 (no suffix) listed as 533MHz too. Maybe it's a typo in my Gigabyte price list.

 

[JMP]

Almost all of the 845 boards easily did the 533 bus, thats what made the P4 1.6 G such a good overclocker, 845E was first one to officially support the 533 P4

Jeff

 

[Bartender]

The Gigabyte GA-8IEMK would seem to fit Tannin a bit better. It comes with integrated sound and LAN, but not integrated video or RAID. The downside is that it only comes with 3 PCI slots. But considering the two integrated components, that is not bad. I suppose the most common adapter cards it would hold are an AGP video card and a PCI modem.

 

[Buck]

How about MSI? There 845E Max (MS-6566E) is a pretty simple board, with only integrated sound, no RAID and 6 PCI slots.

 

[CougTek]

How about MSI?

No, no MSI. Microstar's products are almost always unoptimized enough to make you lost the equivalent of one speed rating. Put a 2GHz P4 in a i845E from MSI and it will give you about the same frame rate and overall performances as a 1.9GHz P4 on an i845E from gagaByte. The same goes for their socket-A motherboard (their nForce implementation is particularly weak against the one from Asus with the latest BIOS revision).

MSI is cheap, most of the time it's stable (although the power regulation issues of their KT266/266A wasn't too reassuring), but one thing it never is is fast. Use Microstar motherboards on your Pentium 4 systems only if you want to make your socket-A systems look good or if you are desperatly looking for a way to shave the price. just to tell you how much MSI products are unoptimized, both their KT333 and i845E boards are beaten at default frequency by their ECS siblings under the majority of benchmarks. No kidding. Don't believe me? See for youselves. The difference isn't night and day, but it tells quite a lot on the amount of research MSI devotes to BIOS optimization.

About the i845E. Not a bad choice, but here the price difference between the i845E and the i845G is only about 20-25$, no more. At the same FSB frequency, the i845G is slightly faster than the i845E according to the many benchmarks I saw over the Net. Plus, the i845G runs a lot better with PC2700 memory than most implementations of the i845E do (I believe x-bit Labs has a review of an EPoX i845E board that made it up to PC3200, but it's the exception and not the rule). If the GA-8IGX is too dear for you Tony then you can't afford much of anything for the P4. All the i850/i850E are significantly more expensive (none here is below 200$ CDN, most around 240$ while the GA-8IGX is 179$ CDN). Cheaper than the GA-8IGX, you only have tthe SiS645 (no DX) and P4X266A from VIA. But these motherboards take quite a performance hit compared to the more recent chipsets. For what it worths, the Asus P4S333 wasn't bad back when the SiS645 was the fastest DDR chipset for the P4, but now it's behind by a good margin.

Pentium 4 and cheap doesn't mix Tony. It's not AMD, it's Intel, you should know that. If you want to show off a Pentium 4 config, show it with the right components for it or simply don't do it. Making an half-hearted effort to match Athlon XP prices with a Pentium 4 platform isn't going to end up as something I would like to buy and probably not something your customers should buy either. Here a typical computer system cost between 1500$CDN and 2500$CDN. I figure that in Australia, it must hover around 2500AU$ and 4000AU$ when you factor the higher component cost and the lower dollar value. Don't tell me that you can't add a mere 80AU$ on a 2500AU$ or 3000AU$ computer, I won't believe it.

 

[Tea]

No, I can't go adding $80 to a system, Coug. All that does is price me out of the market. There are 30-odd computer dealers in this small town: $80 is well and truly enough to make you uncompetitive. For this sort of system, the last few percent of performance are neither here nor there. Not many people thinking about buying a P4 know or care anything about performance anyway. The performance-conscious buyers all switched to Athlons long ago. (Though the time might come when they start to switch back, if AMD don't pull their finger out and get some new product out the door soon.)

If you actually have a buyer who is genuinely interested in a high-end system, then it becomes a different matter. Then you can lay out various options and work out what things it is worth spending extra on. The guy who bought the P4-2000 and board yesterday, for example, knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted whichever P4 chip was the best value for money right now, 512MB of DDR, and a Gigabyte ... er ... can't remember the model number. An expensive one with on-board RAID, USB 2.0, and everything bar the kitchen sink. Paul is big enough and ugly enough to make his own decisions, so I just ordered the bits he asked for. He works in the trade and learned the basics years ago when he worked at a great little local computer shop. Can't remember the name of it. Red something or other, I think

The people the P4 system on my price list is aimed at are the ones who buy a system every five years or so and still think that Intel Inside is the mark of a quality computer. There aren't many of them left now, just a dwindling handful, and they are thinking that it might be nearly time to upgrade their Pentium MMX 200 or their Pentium II 266, or their Katmai 500. They ask for a Pentium 4, then they take the price list home and read it. (Our price list is about ten pages long - it has heaps of background about things like the difference between SDRAM and DDR, or choosing a suitable video card, or thinking about long-term cost of ownership, and just one page with the actual prices on it - more of a short introduction to buying wisely than an actual price list.) Then they call back a few days later and order an Athlon XP. But there has to be a P4 system on the list or they won't bother reading it. The system can be as plain and boring as you like. I guess I could just make a P4 system up - insofar as no-one buys them anyway, it wouldn't matter if it had an Intel i899 chipset! But I prefer to stick to real components, even for my paper system. And once in a blue moon, someone actually does buy one. (About twice a year, maybe once a year.) (In previous years, of course, it was a P-III or a Celeron or a P-II. Same difference.) So, just for those few souls who do go that way, I like our paper system to be something that I can trust to be reliable. It doesn't matter if the performance isn't anything special - people interested in ultimate performance buy Athlons anyway or, like Paul, sit down with me and work out a made-to-order system with whatever bits are most appropriate.

(Sometimes you get one of these guys who comes in to have his data transferred onto the new box and he explains how great his old Intel Inside system has been, and how much more reliable Intel chips are, and you open up the unit and discover a 6x86MX in there! He thought it was an Intel 686 Pentnium. Or something. This is a moment when one should exercise a good deal of tact. Doesn't happen often anymore, but every now and then I see this, and always chuckle.)

Anyway, the purpose of the price list system is simply to offer an Intel-based alternative. It has to be as cheap as possible (because people compare prices and yes, $80 is too much extra) and it has to be made from decent, reliable bits (i.e., Gigabyte, Epox, etc.) which are not hopelessly outdated or limited (just in case someone actually does order one). No-one ever does, of course. Well, maybe a couple a year. But lots of people look at that one first, do their sums, and then decide to buy an XP 1800.

Looks like the 845E is the way for me to go then. The SiS chipset is off the pace now, if I read your post correctly,yes? And the VIA is hard to find. I think those plain 845s (no suffix) I see on my Gigabyte pricelist must be 845Es, because otherwise they wouldn't advertise them as 533MHz. I tried looking them up on the web, but the nodel numbers on Gigabyte's site and the ones on my Gigabyte distributor's price list don't match up.

PS: Like you, I have gone off MSI products. Too damn fussy about RAM, and often not such good value as the other brands. I'm still getting isues with those first-generation MSI KT133As we sold. Hopeless at 133MHz. Mostly I can get them going OK if I slip a Duron in instead.

Thanks all, and Coug in particular. I'll go off the air on this subject now, mark the case closed for the next six months, and go back to the main game: building Athlons.

 

[CougTek]

You could also consider the i845G-based GigaByte GA-8IGML_T, which is very similar to the µ-ATX i845E-based motherboard that Buck linked above, except that it uses the slightly faster i845G chipset. I saw it for only 136$CDN, so it's about 45$CDN cheaper than the ATX-sized GA-8IGX I told you about ealier. 45$CDN show be ~55AU$. Not the 80$ you asked for, but close. Just curious, but how much is the 8IGX and 8IGML_T selling for in kangaroo land? Using a currency converter and using my prices, they should be around 211AU$ and 160AU$, but I bet they are quite a bit more than that.

If I were you, I would strongly consider the 8IGML_T for office-targeted computers. The integrated Intel GPU is good enough for word processing/spreadsheet softwares and internet surfing. And since the gagabite has an AGP slot, it can be upgraded later on with a more power graphic solution if needed. Also, with the 6-channel integrated audio (Realtek ALC650, apparently quite good) and integrated LAN, even if you pay a little more for the motherboard, you end up saving quite a lot on the overall system price. Combined that motherboard with the Pentium 4 1.8GHz (I'm talking about the one with the Northwood core, like every time from now on that I refer to Pentium 4 CPU) that can easily reach 2.4GHz (533MHz FSB) at default voltage and retail heatsink since the last core stepping and you end up with a pretty high-end system for a middle-range price.

Anyway, could you share the config you have put on your marketing list? I'm curious to see what Ballarat's people can buy from RedHill Technologies on the Pentium 4 side.

With the Pentium 4 2.8GHz to be anounced on August 26th and the huge price drop the 2.53GHz piece will see in result (down to 243U$ from over 600U$), the Pentium 4 will because both the best bang for the buck and clear best overall bang for quite a while in the middle to high-end segment. As much as you seem to favor AMD, you'll have to face it and start to give Intel a greater place on your featured systems list. I know I will push my customers towards the Pentium 4 platform until the nForce2 arrives and the 333MHz FSB Athlon too. Only then will AMD be competitive again against Intel (and later on with the Hammer, but that's at least 5 months about).

 

[Tea]

From our blurb:

3: Pentium 4 2000 with Gigabyte DDR mainboard & 256MB DDR RAM

It is an odd mixture, the Pentium 4; because it performs only six tasks per clock-tick (as opposed to the Athlon's nine tasks per tick) it sounds a lot faster than it actually is: the 2000, for example, is a competent upper-mid range part, a cut above a Celeron or Duron, but no faster than an XP 1700. It is only in the 2200+ ranges that the P4 starts to pull ahead.

The Pentium 4 has changed a great deal since the sluggish first-release versions, and is now a genuine performer. But although the latest versions are a good deal faster and the best of them can now match or even beat the Athlons, their price-performance ratio remains well below par. Our normal recommendation is to order a faster, lower cost Athlon XP instead, and use the change to buy a better monitor, a Gforce IV, or more RAM.