Need help choosing a motherboard...

[HubertP]

I'm in the process of buying parts for a new computer, which I will be using primarily for Adobe Premiere 6, but I can't make up my mind about any specific motherboard. I will be getting a Pentium 4 2.4GHz, two Western Digital 80Gb 7200rpm 8Mb harddrives for striping, and I was hoping to use 512Mb DDR400 RAM. Now all I need is a good RAID motherboard, or a good motherboard and a RAID controller. Any suggestions?

 

[mjinks61]

The Ausus P4PE is a good one, can get it with IDE raid built in, but will only go to DDR333 for now. It isn't terribly expensive either. Around 140 from newegg.com. Good luck, and Happy Computing

 

[Comtech]

I would choose the P4G8X over the P4PE in this case. Cheers,
Jim

http://members.cnx.net/reboot/

 

[jokersmild]

After 5 years of putting together computers, I have never had a problem with a mobo by AOpen. They always come with great documentation, and their site is always up to date.
Boards to stay away from are MSI, I haven't had much joy with them.

 

[Grenage]

IF you can get hold of the GA-8INXP, it's fantastic.

 

[Zych]

I differ with jokersmild. I like the MSI motherboards but I sell mainly AMD systems. After selling about 30 of these I bought one for myself and wife. A lot of people on the [H]ard Forum who like to overclock also like these motherboards. But if you want to go the popular route you will never go wrong with an ASUS motherboard.
Most new systems come with SATA RAID cards built on but SATA HDD are slow in coming out. I would look at the 3WARE 7000-2 card. It costs about $130.00 and is designed for a 2 HDD system. If you want to be able to RAID more than two drives they also have other cards that can RAID 4, 8, and 12 drives. Very fast and also come with Linux drives if you want to run that OS.

- Zych

 

[glammagod]

Whatever you do stay away from Elite motherboards!! extremely flakey and tempramental! Cheap, but you pay for what you get, worth spending the extra and getting a quality one!

 

[conceptumator]

I personally find Asus to be a bit overrated, but they are good boards. For AMD, I like MSI boards, but I hear very good things about AOpen.

One thing to be sure of with the Adobe Preimere is that the board has an AGP slot with the correct voltage for you video card. I know Premier is very limited on which cards it will support and they do vary in voltages.