What is a good pentium motherboard for gaming?

[Lambeth]

What I want: An excellent gaming platform.

What hardware I have:

Pentium 4 2.4 GHz
3 GB DDR SDRAM (2 - 1 GB DIMMs, 2 - 512 MB DIMMs)
3DProphet Hercules Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB

What games I play:

Combat Flight Simulator 3
America's Army
Day of Defeat
Diablo 2

I am currently running an Asus X Series P4S533 MX motherboard. It performs decently, but for some reason I can't overclock my graphics card; in fact, I have to underclock it - otherwise, my machine crashes. I have a 520 Watt power supply in there, so the only issue I can think of is that the motheboard just wasn't designed to handle such a powerful graphics card. It also has only 2 DIMM slots for DDR SDRAM, so I can't use all of my 3 GB's worth of RAM.

I want a motherboard that can surely handle a high-performance graphics card, has the capacity to run a faster P4 processor (for future upgrades), USB 2 capability, and has 4 DDR SDRAM slots.

Does anyone have any recommendations?

[pinipig523]

the asus p4c800 or the newer versions are a-ok. i just built my friend's p4 2.8c and was able to overclock to 3.4ghz on ddr500 ram.

however, you may want to use the dual channel feature on this motherboard and sort out which of your ram sticks to use on this mobo. there is no need to run 2 or 3gb.

[nurdonsite2]

there is no need for the p4c800. just get a p4p800 delux which has the intel 865pe chipset and costs way less then the p4c800. there is basically no difference in the preformence of the 2.

[John Prophet]

I remember reading a while back about the 865 and 875 chipsets etc...and that when the 865's came out, it was discovered that they could easily be bios flashed to enable "PAT"...so it sort of put a ?? on the reason to buy an 875. I am sure intel wasnt too happy with the situation....I dont know how that all turned out in the end. But if the 865 can pretty much match the 875 then why waste the $$$ to go with the 875.

That being said....there are lotssss of quality boards for P4's now. So some of it depends on the features that you want. Some have firewire, dual lan, wireless lan, gigabit lan, dual monitors etc etc etc.

[HeadBand]

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...=BROWSE&depa=1

thats a pretty cool motherboard and gigabyte is a good brand

but i wouldnt recomend going with an intel chipset