Suggestion - Dual Motherboard

[evolive]

Currently, I am running on my 4 year old IWill DBD100 motherboard and it is still perfect to my use. Just as much as I hate it... I am slowly upgrading my hardware and I need a new dual motherboard. The question is... which one? I have looked at Abit VP6 and IWill DVD266-R

I am not too sure if I should even bother with DDR because I doubt I need such great power but it will save me some money buy making the motherboard last a good strong 4-6 years maybe?

What I don't like about the lower end dual motherboards is that it uses the VIA chipsets. I do not know much about it and people have told me that it is a good chip except for the fact that it doesn't use umm... "bus" speed to it's full pontential?

I would love to get another Intel based chipset cuz of my DBD100 (440BX).

Another question of mine is about on-board RAID. Can you use the RAID slots as a regular IDE slot? In another words I can plug-in 8 hard drives? Or you HAVE to use RAID the way RAID is?

If you guys can help... here is something I am looking for in a motherboard... perhaps you guys can help match it. Thank you.

intel chipset
dual p3
ddr
the ability to hook up 8 hard drives
no build-in sound/video/network on motherboard
below 200 bucks at least...

Thank you again...

Current System Spec:
IWill DBD100: Dual P2 400MHz MMX; PC-100 4x128MB

 

[Crashman]

You could get an Asus P2B-D if you were willing to live with a max CPU of a PIII 1000, the P3C-D if you are willing to live with Rambus on a PIII (this motherboard will accept the Powerleap iP3/T adapter and dual PIII Tualatin 1.26GHz/512kb CPU's).

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

 

[jclw]

<A HREF="http://www.2cpu.com" target="_new">http://www.2cpu.com</A>

It's a tough time to buy a dual intel system at the moment. They released the Tualatin PIII cores which are great chips, but there is no practical chipset to run them on. You're pretty much stuck with VIA (junk) or ServerWorks (great, but $$$).

The Prestonia based P4 chips (0.13 P4 Xeon) are already starting to show up, and surprisingly don't look to be that expensive. I wouldn't buy anything right now, but wait and compare the dual 0.13 micron AMD offerings against the dual 0.13 micron intel offerings.

- JW