Legit Reviews

A family friend wants me build a PC for his office that will be used to bid million dollar construction jobs that use spreadsheets that list hundreds of thousands of items. He wants a super fast dual-core machine and wants to run RAID 5 for speed and data loss prevention.

That limits my motherboard choices to just three boards that are available at Newegg as they are the only boards with the ICH8R southbridge which supports RAID 5 and Core 2 processors.

$157.99 -- ABIT AB9 Pro - Link
$239.99 -- Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 - Link
$259.99 -- ASUS P5B Deluxe - Link

All of the boards feature the Intel P965 Express chipset, so which one should I use? Anyone heard pros or cons on teh ABIT AB9 Pro? At $158 it's by far the cheapest of the bunch and in stock.

Since this is going to be an office PC it's not going to be overclocked, so I'm more worried about stability here.

Do not use onbaord RAID5 if you need true redundacy. It is a software solution that uses the CPU for XORing the data as its written and it will drop your performance a huge amout as well as it cant be moved to a new computer or controler.

The best solution is a fully hardware solution, it will have more features, run faster, be more reliable, and portable if/when an upgrade is made.

Yea software RAID sux bad

My choice - Gigabyte of course - this one is even better thatn the one you cant find in the US ( Gigabyte GA-965P-DS4 )

Mike

I have used gigabyte for years with stabilty that rivals anything out there. Maybe I am just lucky, or maybe i have the power of the force to keep them running, or maybe they are just good boards ;)

well I ordered the ABIT AB9 Pro last night and am going to run RAID 1 for disk mirroring and then have the third drive as a storage/backup drive. I'll post pics of the system when it's all done. It was $1800 for everything on it.

Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 Conroe 1.86GHz LGA 775 Processor
ABIT AB9 Pro Socket T (LGA 775) Intel P965 Express ATX Intel Motherboard
CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
eVGA 256-P2-N549-TR Geforce 7600GS 256MB GDDR2 PCI Express
Western Digital Caviar RE WD2500YD 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive x 3
Corsair HX520w ATX12V v2.2 and EPS12V 2.91 520W Power Supply
MITSUMI Black 1.44MB 3.5" Internal USB 2.0 digital card reader with Floppy Drive
SAMSUNG 18X DVD±R DVD Burner With 12X DVD-RAM
Logitech 967496-0403 2-Tone USB + PS/2 RF Wireless Slim Cordless Rechargeable
LIAN LI PC-7B plus II Black Aluminum ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
SAMSUNG 204B-BK Black 20.1" 5ms LCD Monitor
Microsoft Windows XP Professional With SP2B 1 Pack

With the 120mm fans in the Lian Li case and Corsair power supplt plus the fact that the motherboard and video card are passively cooled I have high hopes for noise levels for this office PC as that was a concern of the buyer. Can't wait to build it!

I got in the ABIT AB9 Pro and I'm very unhappy with the board. It's by far one of the hardest boards to set up and get running that i have seen in 5+ years. The BIOS is an ugly pink/purple color and the layout is down right shitty. I can't believe I paid $157.99 for this board as even that is too much. Windows just got done loading, so I'll see how performance and mild overclocking goes.

that sux, my Abit AT8 was kind aa pain in the butt. why dont u RMA?

nobody listens to good ole Mike

Hate to see you having problems! I hope you get it fixed.

RMA = pain in the arse, plus you lose all the shipping.

hell you could probably sell it on ebay for almost what you paid for it.

Mike

If you read the original post that this started in this is for a local company here in missouri and is going to be used to generate million dollar bids for commericial construction jobs and they needed it two weeks ago. Took me a week to get over there... a week to get the parts in... the holiday weekend slowed everyone down and it was supposed to be done today.... No time to RMA and start over as work needs to be done.

It's fixed now... I'm running it at 300MHz FSB x 7 mulit with the 2:3 memory divider. The Corsair memory is running 900MHz CL5 and the CPU is sitting at 2.1GHz... Good enough and a minor speed bump over the stock speeds.

good deal!!! I take it, it is stable with full load on both cores? That would be real nice!

Does the ABIT put out good numbers compared with the other boards? Curious if it has internal problems as well.

Mike

I always hate the "I need it 2 weeks ago" talk from companies. Give me double the money and I can have it in 2 days for ya, if not, then you wait for 2 weeks

What was wrong BTW?