mairving — Sun, 18 May 2003 11:32:09 +0000

It's low mainly because it uses a SIS chipset instead of an Intel one. I have used the P4S533-MX board several times with good success. It is a pretty good low cost solution. Keep in mind a couple of things though. One is that this one only has 2 DDR slots, also 2 SDRAM slots. So if you wanted 1GB of RAM, then you would have to get 2 512 sticks. The other thing to consider is if this board is the one that you plan to use with Linux, it may or may not work since it has proprietary onboard stuff. The P4B533 is a good choice if you don't want onboard.

I have built 100 or so computers over the years. I base my opinions on what has worked the best. I have had the least amount of defective motherboards with Intel and Asus. Aopen has had a higher percentage of bad boards than the those.

rtroxel — Sat, 17 May 2003 23:54:00 +0000

Hi, extrmbob,

I noticed another board at NewEgg, the P4S533-X Pentium 4/Celeron. It costs about $60 - $70, which seems unusually low. Is it because it has less features than the other boards?

Thanks, as always,

Roy

rtroxel — Fri, 16 May 2003 23:09:11 +0000

Hey,thanks for the feedback.

No, I'm not obsessed with AX4B, but the reviews I've read have all been positive, and the price seems reasonable (except at CompUSA), so I thought it might be the way to go.

I worked a lot with Win2000 Advanced Server two years ago, and it kind of clunked, even with 512MB of RAM on a Dell server. However, the bugs might have been ironed out by now. Does "plug-and-pray" really find everything in brand-new boards?

My plan is to have two workstations at home. I want to install Red Hat 8.0 on my current Pentium III (with ASUS P3B-F board) and then install Windows on the new Pentium 4 machine. But before I spend the money, I want a clear idea of what I'm buying.

The best,

Roy

mairving — Thu, 15 May 2003 02:10:53 +0000

Are you sold on this board? Aopen boards in my opinion are 2nd rate behind Asus, Abit and Intel. There are better choices out there, like the ASUS P4S533-MX, if you wan't mostly onboard components or the Asus P4SDX , which is a great board. The Intel D845PESV is also a good stable board. These are priced from $70.99 to $122.99. What processor were you looking at. Knowing CompUSA, it was probably the 2.4Ghz which you can get online for $160. I buy 90% of my stuff from NewEgg. They have great prices, I usually get my order in 2 days and they are great if you ever have to RMA something.

The other question is why are you going to put this on a NT workstation. Don't you have Windows 2000? NT doesn't support Plug-n-Play so it can be a pain to get stuff to work sometimes.