Free Motherboard after rebate

[supaz]

I thought some might be interested in this offer...

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproductdesc.asp?description=13-139-144&DEPA=0

I've never built a PC before and I thought this motherboard would be a good start...considering it's free after rebate

and advice on this board/components?

thx.

[MJ]

Always after something free aint ya supaz

:wink:

[beto]

Looks really good...

[supaz]

Always after something free aint ya supaz

:wink:

huh?

[FM]

http://www.motherboards.org/reviews/motherboards/1435_2.html

"The Dragon 2 V1.0 board utilizes the i865PE chipset from Intel for the North Bridge. This chipset supports all currently available Socket 478 Pentium 4 CPUs. The list includes the newest Prescott 3.4E and 3.4EE Extreme Edition CPUs. The documentation for the motherboard indicates that the Dragon 2 V1.0 board supports CPUs with FSB (Front Side Bus) of 400, 533 and 800 MHz. The board comes with 4 DIMM slots that support up to 4 GB of unbuffered non-ECC DDR memory. One thing that would have been nice to see from Soyo would have been color-coding of the memory slots like many manufacturers do to indicate that dual-channel support needs to be implemented by using slots 1+3, 2+4 or 1+2+3+4. The positioning of the memory slots makes taking out the memory from slot 1 impossible without removing the AGP card first on any medium length card (such as the 9700 Pro we use in our test system). Longer cards such as a GEFORCE FX 6800 may block 2 memory slots from removal."

[FM]

My review: a nice mid-road board if you're not looking for something overly fancy. Just bought one of these to install in our studios for production and I personally believe it'll do very well in handling everything thrown at it.

[MJ]

Always after something free aint ya supaz

:wink:

huh?

slsk, leeching, from me

[Kamal]

why would you still want to go for Northwood architectures when a year down the line, you could pay about $200 more and pick up a Prescott running closer to 4.6 GHZ on DDRII and PCI-Express ?? :?

Buy an expensive motherboard and lower end memory + processor, its the backplane that your computer runs on and you CANNOT go worng with it.

-e-

[Civic_Zen]

Prescott suxx dude, the Northwood is an all around better chip, especially for overclocking. DDR2 has yet to prove itself, and won't on any Intel architecture currently available. PCI-E will eventually provide better performance, as will DDR2, eventually, but it won't for quite a while. And who the hell wants to spend $500 on a video card and another $500 on RAM right now any way??

[Kamal]

the only reason prescott sucks is because of heat from overclocking, architecturally, its a far better chip than the northwood, plus prescott has been designed to take advantage of DDR2 memory, there are little advantages you will see between the prescott and northwood performances in "todays" computers.........

and as time goes by, I'm sure performance gains will become more than apparent.......

and how does DDR2 have to prove itself ?? Just cause there's not sufficient supporting hardware / software that exploits DDR2 performance doesnt make it a bad piece of hardware on its own.....

all I'm saying is buy a motherboard that is modular with future technologies.... because what's today will almost certainly be not in the next year

-e-

[LV-8]

Re:: Free Motherboard after rebate

I heard Intel cancelled their next P4 chop the Tejas due to overheating. So what's next??? I know they are going to hit 4Ghz by the end of the year.

[Civic_Zen]

Go to Anandtech and tomshardware and read the reviews about the architechture that already exists for the Prescott and the new chipsets that support DDR2 and PCI-E. They've already done benchmarks for this hardware here. and they are very disappointing.

"It was hard to resist being glib and titling this article, "Much Ado about Very Little". That feeling of disappointment comes from seeing so much new technology introduced all at once, and then finding out the real performance benefit is extremely small - if it exists at all. If Intel wants us to turn our computer world upside down, there should be a real tangible benefit to the bucks we are expected to spend. Unfortunately, that performance advantage is pretty hard to find - at least for now. There are certainly a few gems in the total package, but if you're looking for a big performance advantage it just isn't there."

We also clearly saw in our performance tests that a current Intel 875 motherboard, running fast DDR memory and a Northwood processor, was just as fast as a 925X running a Prescott at the same speed. This is not really a failing on the part of the new chipsets, though, as it indicates real progress in Prescott development. When Prescott was first introduced, it was a much poorer performer than Northwood. The fact that it is now competitive with Northwood using all these new technologies indicates a lot of progress has been made.

All I'm saying is that you should never hold off on buying something because something better is around the corner. There will always be something better around the corner. If you want to wait, you'll be waiting forever and never buy anything. If you want to make a sound investment now, which will still be sound 6+ months from now, your only logical course is to go with AMD and the 64-bit processors. Even then your not going to be cutting edge becaus the 754 doesn't support DDR2 and PCIe which may have "actual" advantages in the future, but socket 939 is the future for AMD.

Sure you could get a Socket 925XE board now, with a Prescott and wait for something better to come along, but you will have to get one that supports both DDR and DDR2, and then you'll only have 2 dimm slots for both. You also have to buy a PCIe Video card now which means $500 and no performance gain over AGP 8x. AGP still hasn't reached its limit, we aren't even using all of its bandwidth. And your going to spend a lot more all around. Or you can spend a reasonable amount now, and just upgrade everything a year from now. In which case you'll probably end up spending the same amount for both machines, that you would to build this single machine now.

You should never hesitate to buy something, especially when the Motherboard is free, just because it will be obsolete soon. That is the way of the computer world.

[Civic_Zen]

Re:: Free Motherboard after rebate

I heard Intel cancelled their next P4 chop the Tejas due to overheating. So what's next??? I know they are going to hit 4Ghz by the end of the year.

Actually they will be @ 4 GHz by Q1 2005



All Pentium 4 "F" processors have the E-0 stepping which makes them capable of the execute disable (XD) bit. The new "F" series Pentium 4s are already shipping in discreet channels.

The 64-bit enabled Cranford (Nocona Core with 8MB L3 cache) should also show up by Q1 of 2005 as well. The Copper River successor, "Mukilteo", has also been scheduled for Q3'05 and has been labeled as a Pentium 4 workstation CPU; it appears NetBurst is still here to stay for a while.

[Kamal]

Go to Anandtech and tomshardware and read the reviews about the architechture that already exists for the Prescott and the new chipsets that support DDR2 and PCI-E. They've already done benchmarks for this hardware here. and they are very disappointing.

"It was hard to resist being glib and titling this article, "Much Ado about Very Little". That feeling of disappointment comes from seeing so much new technology introduced all at once, and then finding out the real performance benefit is extremely small - if it exists at all. If Intel wants us to turn our computer world upside down, there should be a real tangible benefit to the bucks we are expected to spend. Unfortunately, that performance advantage is pretty hard to find - at least for now. There are certainly a few gems in the total package, but if you're looking for a big performance advantage it just isn't there." .

All I'm saying is that you should never hold off on buying something because something better is around the corner. There will always be something better around the corner. If you want to wait, you'll be waiting forever and never buy anything. If you want to make a sound investment now, which will still be sound 6+ months from now, your only logical course is to go with AMD and the 64-bit processors. Even then your not going to be cutting edge becaus the 754 doesn't support DDR2 and PCIe which may have "actual" advantages in the future, but socket 939 is the future for AMD.

Sure you could get a Socket 925XE board now, with a Prescott and wait for something better to come along, but you will have to get one that supports both DDR and DDR2, and then you'll only have 2 dimm slots for both. You also have to buy a PCIe Video card now which means $500 and no performance gain over AGP 8x. AGP still hasn't reached its limit, we aren't even using all of its bandwidth. And your going to spend a lot more all around. Or you can spend a reasonable amount now, and just upgrade everything a year from now. In which case you'll probably end up spending the same amount for both machines, that you would to build this single machine now.

You should never hesitate to buy something, especially when the Motherboard is free, just because it will be obsolete soon. That is the way of the computer world.

the article said exaclty what I was implying in my post above.... that given the CURRENT conditions of hardware available, there is not much difference between prescott and northwood but given the potential that the Prescott architecture will display when processor speeds keep improving, there will be continued performance gains using prescott over northwood simply because of the way the prescott is built. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/02..._90nm_pentium/

This topic is about the motherboard and what I said was instead of building a high end northwood, you're better off building a low-end prescott because in time, you can still run your motherboard into the ground but keep upgrading just supporting peripherals...

and your comments on PCI-E are whack..... PCI-E is downward compatible so even PCI based cards will run on them...... in fact, because technologies are progressing so fast..... hardware engineers bundle in more code to ensure it runs with the old cause not everyone is hunting for a beast of a mchine

-e-

[undrgrndwmn]

talk about pissed! I just bought the AMD version of this board. Got everything all installed, and then noticed that the ground pins were missing for the usb connections on the board. Still, I bought it for work and will be getting the rebate for me, so HAHAHA!!!