Pentium 4 Motherboards:
Asus P4B and P4T:
The cost of a P4-1.5GHz system with the P4B motherboard is only $60 more than a P3-1GHz system with a Asus CuSL2. Getting a P4 system at this moment with the P4B will give you the best bang for the buck.
The P4B is a Pentium 4 motherboard using Intel’s i845 chipset supporting SDRAM memory architecture only. This chipset also supports DDR-RAM but Intel has disabled it.
P4T is a Pentium 4 motherboard using Intel’s i850 chipset supporting RDRAM memory architecture only.
Background: When the P4 was first released, it ran on Rambus DRAM (RDRAM) memory only. It was a sound technical decision because RDRAM has 3x the data bandwidth of SDRAM. P4 combined with RDRAM would give Intel a system that can rival AMD’s Athlon Thunderbird* CPU line. Unfortunately for Intel, RDRAM is very difficult to manufacture and combined with Rambus’s royalty fees, RDRAM costs 6x more than standard SDRAM. With the significantly higher cost of RDRAM, no one was willing to buy P4s except for researchers and die-hard gamers. Seeing this crisis, Intel then released the i845 chipset to stop slumping market sales.
* See CPU comparison at www.nexus/system.
I have tested both motherboards and they both work well with Nexus. The P4B also comes with a built-in sound card. I only briefly tested the sound card and it works very well. The chipset is Intel Audio CODEC.
Pentium 3 Motherboards:
Asus CuSL2-C, TuSL2 and TuSL2-C
Both TuSL2 and TuSL2-C are based on the Intel i815e and i815ep chipsets respectively. These chipset have been modified to support the Celeron II and 1.13GHz P3. At the time of testing, there were not enough Windows 2000 drivers to supports these 2 motherboards.
I have tested the CuSL2-C and it does work with Nexus. The only problem that I have with this motherboard is that it does not support ECC memory. When ECC memories were inserted onto the motherboard, the system became unstable and corrupted the data on the hard disk.
AMD Thunderbird Motherboard:
Asus A7V
The A7V works very well with Nexus Windows 2000. This motherboard is pretty much the same in stability and configuration as other Asus motherboards except for one exception, an add-on Promise ATA-100 mass storage controller. Most other Asus motherboards have both the ATA-100 and ATA-66 controller integrated into one chipset (2 hdd connectors). This motherboard has them separate (4 hdd connectors).
Windows 2000 by default does not have ATA-100 controller support. If you plug the hdd onto the ATA-100 connector and try to install Windows 2000, Windows 2000 installation will fail. In order to get around this, there is a section during set-up that allows you to install the necessary drivers for the mass storage controller. Once it is done, Windows 2000 will install without any other problems.
Summary:
The P4B is a good value motherboard.
The P4T is expensive.
CuSL2 is a good motherboard that works well in Windows 2000.
TuSL2 and TuSL2-C – no yet supported.
A7V – good choice but required special installation of ATA controller driver.
Last updated: Tue Dec. 17