AB9 QuadGT or P5B Deluce Wifi?

[Mutley]

I suspect you're right. Can you post your initial impressions when get and install the board?

[Dreaming]

So what would be the reason to pick the 975 over the 965 in this case? I've read lots of good things about the P5B...I think its a similar price to the P5W.

It has crossfire support and I have one x1950pro, was considering going to two as it is designed to run it quite nicely (just needs a bridge rather than a silly master card). But might get two mid range dx10 cards now instead. That was my 'original' plan though.

[Martin87]

i won't be getting the board for a bit Mutley strapped for cash but i just saw it and it looks to be the doggies B******! Keeping my eye on it that's all!

[excalibur2]

So basically it still comes down to Abit or Asus. Getting a warmer fuzzy feeling about the Asus I have to say.

Any voters for the Abit?

Excaliber, where did you see the P180 for 67?

On scan "today only" a few weeks ago, they are now listed as £69.89 plus Vat

[BUFF]

I had a Gigabyte DS4 (nice board btw but they did have over 6 months to sort the BIOS), swapped it for the QuadGT & I'm not sorry.

Where the abit scores over the Asus P5B (& the Gigabyte) imo:
uGuru is the best hardware monitor/fan control offered by any mobo mfr.

the onboard power/reset switches & the external ClearCMOS are all nice touches.

whilst both boards are capable of running over 500fsb the Asus switches to the looser 1333 strap ~400fsb whilst the abit sticks on the 1067. This means that over 400fsb the abit is quicker clock for clock.

if you like a bit of bling the abit has about 6 different settings for the blue LEDs that backlight the board.
Combine it with some Ballistix Tracer (blue leds highlight the slots) & you can rival Las Vegas!

& do seriously consider a SATA optical with any board that doesn't have native PATA support & uses the JMicron.

[Richh]

So basically it still comes down to Abit or Asus. Getting a warmer fuzzy feeling about the Asus I have to say.

Any voters for the Abit?

In my book the QuadGT rules. The component design and physical layout are both triff, it overclocks like beggery, and nothing else on the market gets near uGuru's power and versatility as far as the hardware control and monitoring is concerned.

The JMicron controller justifies the bad press it's got over the last few months, but now seems to be pretty much tamed. I pity the poor sods who had to cope with the early driver/JM BIOS builds but I've had no problems booting from or running parallel ATA optical drives off this one.

Arguably the best thing of all is that the board shipped with what was to all intents and purposes a pre-release BIOS on it. As such, as fast as it goes now, it has the potential to go even quicker as the BIOS is matured.

[chis]

Has no-one here had any experience with recent Microstar motherboards? The Abit and Asus boards I've worked with in the past have all been average at best, MSI have been excellent. But the last MSI board I bought was socket 754!

[BUFF]

the MSI 965s are supposedly competent & good vfm for running stock but not great overclockers.
Iirc the 975X is fairly similar.

The 650i P6N SLI-FI doesn't appear to be a great overclocker at least with the release BIOS (similar to abit's FP-IN9) & the 680i P6N Diamond hasn't shown up yet.

[Mutley]

My current board is an MSI..but just to put that in perspective, its running the SiS 645DX chipset! Quite old.
But its an excellent board for its time, and still working well.

So, whats the deal with Jmicron then? I've not read anything about this chip. Can someone fill me in on why it is bad (or good) compared to the opposition?

uGuru is one of the reasons that the Abit looks good to me, as Richh said.

Thanks for the ongoing feedback, its appreciated.

[BUFF]

So, whats the deal with Jmicron then? I've not read anything about this chip. Can someone fill me in on why it is bad (or good) compared to the opposition?

Intel in their wisdom decided to drop PATA support from the 965 chipset before SATA optical drives were widely available at reasonable prices.
As a result all the mobo manufacturers added an additional controller to their boards to give IDE/PATA support - the most popular choice of which by far has been the JMicron.
Unfortunately due to drivers or whatever it's been pretty tricky for a lot of people across the whole range of boards that it's been used on.
Hopefully it's now pretty much resolved as Richh says but I took the easy way out when I had the Gigabyte & bought a SATA DVD-R/RW & just used that when I swapped to the QuadGT.

[Dreaming]

Has no-one here had any experience with recent Microstar motherboards? The Abit and Asus boards I've worked with in the past have all been average at best, MSI have been excellent. But the last MSI board I bought was socket 754!

My last computer (socket A) had an MSI motherboard and I didn't like it. At all. I can't say in particular what was wrong with it, well I couldn't overclock it at all because I couldn't change the fsb speed in the bios, but I dunno, just wasn't fond of it.

Does the job, though.

[excalibur2]

^^ I have had a DS3 and I have to say that it was much worse than even the commando for build quality, it was actually flimsy, and cheap feeling (was 110 at the time as well), that said, it was an early version, so maybe the new ones are a bit better.

For me the DS3P is attractive as I have a printer and scanner on the parallel port, and I switch between the two with a mechanical switch box.........not sure if it will work properly with all the other modern MBs that only have USB and therefore forced to use parallel/USB convertor.
And no! I don't want to be forced to buy a new printer and scanner............. :-)

[Mutley]

The point about PATA for optical devices is an interesting one, I'd completely failed to realise this point, while thinking of which SATA HDDs to get... I have a couple of optical devices I was intending to use, but maybe getting SATA optical drives isn't such a bad however. However, I can't imagine that optical drives can possible consume the available bandwidth SATA provides over PATA.

[Clunk]

The point about PATA for optical devices is an interesting one, I'd completely failed to realise this point, while thinking of which SATA HDDs to get... I have a couple of optical devices I was intending to use, but maybe getting SATA optical drives isn't such a bad however. However, I can't imagine that optical drives can possible consume the available bandwidth SATA provides over PATA.

Yep, it is surprising how things speed up when the jmicron is disabled. The sata burner seems more responsive as well, I'm not sure if this is the actual burner, or the interface though

[Mutley]

Just been reading over on Anandtech an updated review of the AB9, after Abit released some beta BIOS updates. Looks like things are improving a lot, and a new release should be available soon.

[BUFF]

mine has run fine since day 1 but I don't do RAID anymore & I already had a SATA optical from using the Gigabyte.