P4P800/i865 or P4C800/i875

[Phalanx-Imawano 0]

I think I recently accidentally damaged my motherboard (ASUS P4P800-X) while installing a new Fan/Heatsink (Global WIN CAK4-88T, which proved to be a better and quieter cooler than the previously installed Thermlatake Volcano 7+, but tricky to install - the screwdriver I used slipped at one point and stuck part of the motherboard in the process). While my PC boots up okay, the built-in SATA ports don't work anymore (in fact in the Windows Device Manager, only 1 set of the Primary/Secondary IDE channels are present; there used to be two of each, one set for ATA-100 and the other for SATA; at the moment my SATA drives are connected to my Promise SATAII150+ PCI controller card). So I'm planning on replacing the board in case there's more damage than what is currently visible. What's a good replacement board? I'm contemplating on either the ASUS P4P800E Deluxe (i865 chipset w/ SATA RAID) or the more expensive ASUS P4C800E Deluxe (i875 chipset also with SATA RAID) which might just be out of my budget at the moment until payday comes. Either case it's gonna have to be something that can handle my Pentium4 3.0E Prescott and a pair of 512MB DDR-400 DIMMs (Dual Channel mode). One website claimed a mobo with the i875 chipset is better due to its alleged improved power rating over the i865 chipset (true or false?).

[jmmijo 1]

I can't say I've heard that claim about the power rating before, however, by design the 875P chipset has the performance features like PAT that help tweak your system.

 

I personally own the P4C800 Deluxe motherboard and it's a fine piece of design, just make sure to have the latest BIOS installed to properly support the Prescott core CPU's

[Phalanx-Imawano 0]

Question about that P4C800 - is that the one with RAID support (ICH5R or Promise controller?)? If yes, can those RAID ports (ATA-100 and SATA) be used for regular hard disk setups and not as RAID?

[jmmijo 1]

Actually it has both the Intel ICH5R and the Promise SATA RAID controller onboard.

 

Since the Intel chipset also supports a pair of ATA100 ports, these are used as only standard non-RAID mode controllers.

 

 

[Phalanx-Imawano 0]

Well I decided to go ahead and get the P4P800E Deluxe. I'm very pleased so far - I guess thanks to the fact that it has the same chipset as my old board, there was no need to go through the cumbersome Windows XP Repair-Install (although WPA decided my copy of WinXP needed reactivation so I have 3 days to do so). After playing around, I learned that both the ICH5 and Promise SATA ports can function either in RAID or non-RAID modes depending on the BIOS settings (though in Windows, the Promise controller needs a different driver depending on the mode). Even better - I used to have problems with my Seagate 120GB SATA drive when it was connected to an onboard SATA port on my old P4P800-X - any write operation would either put it in PIO mode or send WinXP into BOSD (an interim solution was a separate Promise PCI SATA controller card). None of that happening with this new board - even with the ICH5R ports (i.e. this board has no issues with SATA drives having NCQ capability, so I was able to get rid of the Promise PCI SATA card, plus there's the onboard Promise controller anyway if I'm gonna add more devices). Other bonuses I got to like are the 1394 ports and the fact that the AGP slot is given some breathing space away from the PCI slots (there's a gap between the AGP slot and the first PCI slot where another PCI slot would have been - something unique to this board and its brother the P4P800-SE) so that any Vidcard with a big bad heatsink/fan (like my old Inno3D GeForce FX5600 VIVO which has an almost 1" thick heatsink) won't crowd my PCI cards.