Damn. Let me finish here: The Cpu- 1.6a Nw and 512 megs of PC800.

Too make a long story short, nothing but problems. I've installed 98se and Xp on different partitions -3 different times. I'm having all sorts of strange behavior like both installations going corrupt for example. So I'm about to rush out and do the Opus thing and join the ANUS club. Everyone seems to have success with the P4B and DRR memory. I'll try that. This Abit doesn't seem to like anything I plug into it.

Before you rush out and buy both new mobo and memory, can you return the ABITch TH7IIR and exchange it towards an ASUS P4T-E since you already have the rambus memory on hand?

My new computer is a Rambus ANUS (gawd that sounds bad, really really bad) P4T-E 1.6a P4 512MB Samsung PC800 and it is running spectacularly smooth and fast overclocked at FSB 133 for 2.13GHz cpu speed and 399MHz memory bus.

I haven't even had a single hint of a stability problem with it. In fact it's been running so perfect that I'm somewhat fearful that things are working too good (that calm before the storm Murphy's Law thing??? I sure hope not).

Well, after hearing your report, I think I'll consider that. Here is a delima I've always had: I've always grappleted towards boards with onboard raid because I use three hard drives:

1) IBM 60GXP partitioned in two for booting 98se and XPpro. (40 gigs)
2) A Seagate Barracuda for dedicated for audio (30 gigs)
3) A Western Digital for backups and storage, (mp3s etc..) (30gig)
And of course my CD rom/burner.

I can have the four of these co-existing without having to slave anything or add a pci controller.
However, I'm thinking about this idea: Get a large 80 or 100 gig 7200Rpm and
1) Keep my IBM partitioned in two
2) Partition the new drive in two...One for Audio, the other for backups
3) Slave the CdRom off of the IBM.
This way I have no raid or extra pci card in the system. The disadvantage might be slower boot times and maybe less-reliable burning? What do you think?

Hey also, does the bios on the P4T-E have the ability to turn ACPI off and disable plug n' play. I know the P4B does.

Originally posted by KeithW:
Hey also, does the bios on the P4T-E have the ability to turn ACPI off and disable plug n' play. I know the P4B does.

Yep it sure does. I explicitly looked for this feature before buying the P4T-E . I am running as "Standard PC" with ACPI disabled.

As to the IDE raid, I'm running a pair of IBM 80GB GXP-120 series drives as raid-1 mirrored on a Promise FastTrak 100 TX2 card. I don't yet need any more thruput beyond what ATA/100 gives me, but I sure enjoy the security and peace of mind of having a mirrored pair for my main disk. I might add a 3rd drive to be my "D drive" workspace for DAW stuff, but then copy all my work back to the mirrored drive C for backup security at the end of each session.

I am running as "Standard PC" with ACPI disabled

Great! Do you use WinXp? If so, do you still have to press F5 at the blue screen to install the Standard PC kernal?
Also I'm wondering, do you have any experience with the Motu cards?

Yes, you still need to do the ol F5 thang to enter into Standard PC...
Motu works great with any Intel chipsets...
Opus

Except that on my Motu, the Wave driver refuses to start in WinXp. This is only on the newer drivers. The older Wdm install and work but performance left a little to be desired. I believe I've narrowed it down to a specific problem with XP, since the same new Wdm drivers install and work fine under Win98SE. I've also tried it on different chipsets with different graphics cards..same thing. The error is Code 10: Device cannot start. Maybe I should try Win2000.