mynickers

Spoke to a friend earlier, his mobo has gone, asked if I could recomend something good / cheap.

I haven't looked at PC bits for quite a while, and I am not doing his homework for him!!

However, if any of you monitor these things or have recently been in the market for one, and can recommend, that would be a big help.

Cheers

Nick

_Meridian_

iTrader: (1)

What processor? Do you plan on overclocking? And you do realise that there's a reason why some boards are so cheap, don't you?

Generally:

Abit are good. Epox, Asus, MSI, DFI are pretty good. Rest are also-rans except ECS, AOPen and ASRock, all of which are complete rubbish.


M

Trem

iTrader: (3)

Ask anyone, Asus are the daddy at the moment. Asus for either processor.

Abit are good but a bit fussy with certain things.

mynickers

Edit Sorry - socket type would of been helpful wouldn't it, I was a bit pissed when I came in last night He has socket A at the moment, but I think he is considering just getting a bundle, as he recently bought a new hard-drive, so why not rebuild whole thing....His curent mobo is MSI, he has up until now not had problems with it.

I have ASUS A7N8X Deluxe one of the first generation Nvidia chip sets, mine is quirky as buggary, but I think it's ether conflict with Ram or conflict with ATI Radeon 8500 - have heard of a few people having problems with these lil buggars.

Just been looking around, there are some great deals these days, the predecessor of my board is peanuts - *******s I paid a reletive fortune for mine never going to be an early adopter of computer technology again I got utterly fleeced when I biult mine.

And yes i know why cheap things are cheap, but cheap things can also be because the product life cycle is so fast, you can get stuff that is oouch three months out of date, alredy being replaced and going for peanuts.

The reason I asked in here, is that I have read various posts of people building PC's, and thought people might be up to speed on it, when I was looking I new pretty much everything on the market, as I constantly monitored prices, reviews etc, but thankfully those days are over for me

Check out this bundle of the new version of my board, selling cheaper than I bought my entire board (on it's own) for, and with 2700 CPU, and ram!

http://www.komplett.co.uk/k/ki.asp?sku=114449&cks=PRL

_Meridian_

iTrader: (1)

I asked several people and they all say: "white man speak with forked tongue". Sorry, but Asus come a poor second to Abit.


If you ONLY replacing the m/b, and you're not overclocking, the Abit AN7 is the one.

If you want to move to P4s (do not get Prescott and/or Socket 775) then the i875 chipset is the best - Abit IC7 is the one. The get the fastest P4C (800MHz bus) you can afford.


M

HankScorpio

Don't get an anything (specifically asus) with Via Chipset if you want to run a Radeon Video card. (That's 160 quid of experience talking )

I had old asus, got a Radeon... ran games for 30 secs, fell over.
Bought a new Asus (A7V8x deluxe), added radeon... ran games for 30 secs, fell over.
Bought new 450W PSU... ran games for 30 secs, fell over.
Update bios, VIA bits, drivers.... ran games for 30 secs, fell over.
Bought Asus A7N8x deluxe... no issues, even with old PSU

The VIA forums have hundreds of similar cases...

what would scooby do

ASUS - I have also got the A7N8X delux and it's 100% tip top and is the best investment in hardware.. I likes it (a lot)

molko

asus p4p800 is v.good

Taff107

Just put in a Asus K8V Deluxe m/b with a Athlon 64 xp 3200 and Radeon 9800 pro. Absolutely no problems - Probably the easiest install I have ever done.

Highly recommend it

mynickers

How you been finding the 64, I been looking at bundles myself now!

mynickers

I went around and had a look at his machine, there wasn't anything wrong with it, he had just changed the configuration (majorly) and not done a fresh install of his OS, just tried to change the drivers etc - amazingly it workd for quite a while, was just very quirky. He had just bought a new harddrive though, so I put that in as his primary, and installed WinXP fresh, and it works fine now!

Taff107

To be honest, I doubt you would be able to tell much of a difference from a 'normal' 3200. I bought it to 'future-proof' as I refuse to buy for quite a while. Combined with the 9800 pro / kv8 and Corsair ram, it is spot on. Just putting on 'old' games like Call of Duty, Vice city etc at the moment and seeing how much of a difference there is with full detail/settings

mynickers

Future proof - *sighs* I am never gonna be future proof again, I spent a reletive fortune on my present system over the years, I am happy with last years best at bargain prices early adopters - always get stung..

Check out some of these bundles:

Intel P4 Prescott 2.8GHz Retail / Abit IC7 / 512MB GeIL PC3200 Value Dual-Channel Kit - (£277.59 Including VAT at 17.5%)

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatal...l_Bundles.html

AMD Athlon XP2800 Retail / Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe / 512MB Corsair PC3200 Value Dual-Channel Kit - Bundle - (£224.37 Including VAT at 17.5%)

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/AMD_Bundles.html

Upgrade Kit Intel P4 2.8GHz Abit IS7, PC3200 DDR 512MB - £232.00

http://www.komplett.co.uk/k/ki.asp?sku=118334&cks=PRL

I been working out, might actually better to get a bundle and sell my bits on ebay, then upgrading memory and CPU alone..

_Meridian_

iTrader: (1)

Unless you are using a 64-bit OS, then the socket 754 CPUs are about the same performance as the 32-bit equivalent, i.e. an A64 3200 is the same performance as an old 32-bit XP3200+. There's a slight improvement, but not much. Only if you have the money for socket 939/940 and the faster A64s (3500 and above) will you see an improvement.

As for Intel, Prescott seems to give off as much heat as AMD CPUs - the one place Intel used to lead!


M

InvisibleMan

so whats wrong with the 'prescott' apart from its name maybe...

what would the difference between the 478 & (newer?)lga775 socket

Hanslow

Gigabyte make good boards too. Me and the missus are currently both running them (different models though), hers with GeForce Ti4200, mine with a Radeon 9700 Pro. Both with VIA chipsets running AMD CPUs.

Both were completely plug and play. No quirky issues. Run like a dream.

I had an Abit board previously and gave me no end of grief with my old GeForce 2 GTS card

Best thing to do is probably scan the motherboard forums, and look for the ones that have the least problems

InvisibleMan

hmmm ok & which psu is needed?

InvisibleMan

do you think they were taking the pee when they named the intel p4 'prescott' chip?......i notice it has a fat wad of cache...

_Meridian_

iTrader: (1)

To be fair, the two biggest concerns about Prescott probably aren't an issue to most people: a) they are p*ss-poor overclockers (whereas P4C was great), and they give off loads of heat, making cooling a real problem. But P4s are STILL a a badly designed and gutted PCU that can only keep up be being run at very high speeds. AMD CPUs can do the same work at far lower speeds - but can't be scaled like the P4 can. Both are legit approaches, but it's the brute force of Intel against the design of AMD.

Prescott performs better than the standard P4C, but not by much.

As for PSU, get a 400W minimum. You might want to try and find one with built-in SATA power connectors, to save converting from Molexes.


M