Rad,

At the moment I'm using the P4T-E with the new Northwood.
It has *no* stability issues. (None.) Far as over-clocking goes,
I use a program called CPUFSB from Podien. I have a full selection
of FSBs available, off the ICS generator, which also allows me to
fix the divider issue. I wrote to ASUS, asking them to implement
this feature in their next BIOS release.

At this moment I'm running my 1.8A Northwood at 2.5GHz. It is
*completely* stable. I'm using 2x256MB Samsung RDRAM sticks
of PC800. 

If you look at the first 850 board from Asus, they also had parallel
RIMM slots. Asus also had the fastest 850 board, as verified by
Toms Hardware in his 9-board roundup. On this socket-478 revision,
Asus redesigned the board & repositioned the RIMMs. This gave the
board added stability and better trace lengths to the RIMMs.

The Abit is not stable at high FSBs. Using my same Rambus RIMMs,
I have to lower the multiplier to 3x. Also because of the high initial
current draw, the Abit often refusues to boot. Only a CMOS reset
will fix this. This is a known issue that can be found on many Abit
forums.

The board also had the famous over-clocking strips added. No other
Abit boards ever used these, including the latest releases.

To come back to your point about independent references, I am
an independent, and I purchase all my own hardware. Fortunately
I'm able to offload my equipment quickly and move on to new stuff
by using either the For Sale forums, or mostly when I build custom
systems by request, which is quite often at the moment.

In my honest opinion, the ASUS P4T-E is BY FAR the better board.
It's faster and more stable (*completely* stable, in fact). I have
*never* generated a single error, and I'm using WinXP Pro. Suspend
to ram functions properly. The board also has an APIC chip that
sorts out many IRQ problems, although you need WinXP or Win2K
SP2 in order to use this feature.

I hope this answers your questions. Feel free if you have other
questions. I am speaking from *experience* of using the two boards.
On paper the Abit seems to offer more, but reality is another story.

Great web site, btw.

Dylan Williams
Wrexham North Wales