Brand of Motherboards...and so on...

[Jungmamr]

Can someone tell me exactly what motherboard to get for a Pentium 4 2.4 ghz processor? I mean, what brand and so on...also, what type of memory should I get. I am thinking about what video card to get too, any info on one of those would be nice too. Thanks!

Matt

[bugalaman]

abit ic7, corsair xms (or kingston hyperX) dual 256mb (dual 512 if you have the money) PC 3200, radeon 9800np oc'd to pro speeds

[slinky]

all good except.. ASUS P4P800 Deluxe

[WingWizard]

Abit IC7, but NOT the corsairs; the corsairs now have the ch-5 chips which don't work well with 875/865 chipsets. Get some Geil Golden Dragons or OCZ pc-3700; I heard that the Mushkin Black lvl IIs are good too.

[slinky]

issues associated to the IC7-G, IC7, and at least some IS7 motherboards:

You can see the problems we (owners of these motherboards) have reported on the abit-usa forum at:
http://forum.abit-usa.com/showthread.php?threadid=12382
In a nut shell: you can hear noise through the onboard sound when you: 1)move your mouse when running windows and 2)when you access your hard drives located on the pata and/or on the sata (Intel) ports; This is especially noticeable when running “Check Now…”/(Check-disk). There is also an issue with the onboard microphone: volume to low or lots of noise when trying to record/chat.
Some people have tried to get around these problems by disabling the onboard sound and installing a sound card but this has not worked for everybody who has tried this; some still hear the noise coming through their sound cards. There doesn’t seem to be a sure fire way to fix these problems.
I bought four IC7-G motherboards and they all had these problems. There were significant differences in the motherboard serial numbers for me to assume that I didn't get the motherboards from the same batch, but I maybe wrong on this. The Abit forum entries seem to indicate this is not an isolated incident.
Abit has made No formal announcement about these issues since the last time I checked their website. This is not good customer service.
Abit is forcing it's customers to pay shipping, one-way, for the RMA; this seems unreasonable since it appears to be a design flaw and it should have been caught during their design phase or their QA. This is not good customer service.
It also appears, from a statement on the forum, from someone who seems to know a little about electronics, that the fix from Abit is a Band-Aid and not a true fix. This also is not good customer service.
In my opinion, Abit, or any company, should cover all expenses and implement real fixes (not a Band-Aid) when a problem is a design issue or a bad parts quality issue.
As for websites that post reviews, these problems are easily reproducible. Why aren’t they seeing or in this case hearing these problems and reporting it; especially when these issues are brought to their attention from customers who experienced these problems first hand? This is a great disservice to your readers. In my opinion, if you post a review then you have an obligation, out of social decency, to look into and possibly report on easily found and non-insignificant problems found with the reviewed items, if they are brought to their attention. I’ve spent more in gas then I wanted to and countless hours testing different configurations to get around these problems. I would have appreciated a small warning, at the end of the review mentioning that some buyers have run into issues; and mention the issues. I am not asking a complete rework of the review, unless needed, just an addendum to it mentioning the more problematic issues that seem to have a greater chance of being found. As well, I am not asking action to be taken on the word of just one person... I am asking for common sense and reasonable actions.
For clarification, I do not hold the review sites responsible for my purchase decisions, but I do hold them accountable for not reporting in a reasonable and common sense fashion. When this is not adhered to I will no longer frequent their websites as they no longer meet the needs that I have.
CAVEAT EMPTOR - Buyer beware.