ScoobyDoo555

I'm off to buy a new chip and motherboard this weekend...

Going for an Athlon Gig.

Any advice on the best M/Board to get?

I've got a decent graphics and sound card...

Thanks in advance.....

Dan

Hanslow

I'm looking at doing exactly the same thing.

I've decided to go for an Abit KT7A (not the Raid one, just the standard one).

Seems to get decent reviews and stand up quite well.

ScoobyDoo555

Hi Hanslow,

Which one were you going for?

1. ABIT KT7 ATHLON/DURON SCK A ATX
2. ABIT KT7-A SCK A ATHLON ATA100

Cheers

Dan

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

On Abit Boards, the 'A' indicates that the motherboard is using the newer VIA 686B southbridge, which includes ATA100 support, as opposed to ATA66 support that the older 686A southbridge had.

Therefore, as Hanslow said,the KT7A is the one to go for, unless you have 2 identical drives and want to stripe them together for a bit more kick!

Nick

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

Forgot to mention that both the KT7 and KT7A series really are up there at the top of the pile and have won countless best of breed awards over the last 6 months or so. Asus ones are pretty good too, but I have 4 different Abit boards and they all blast along!


Nick

ScoobyDoo555

How about the Gigabyte stuff?

I've found the ABIT one for £89

I was also looking at the Gig GA-71XE4, but a bit cheaper @ £65.....

Any comments?

Dan

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

I can't find that one m8... Have a GA-6BXE board here and it is excellent. I have always liked gigas and they are usually damn stable, but they usually are not quite as flexible as the Abit and Asus variants. Dunno if you are going for overclocking or any of that like I do, but the Abit and Asus are also really currently the best for this as well.

You have probably already bought whatever it was that you wanted, but if not, then check

Hanslow

Nick,

I'm about to get myself an Abit KT7A board...what info do I need to know about as far as components go? Are there problems with some components on this board?

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

Not too much bad news......
Be careful what heatsink, or more specifically FAN you use. 1 Bad thing that Abit did is that during updating their BIOS's, they introduced a little'saftey' feature, that when powered on, checked for a CPU fan connected to header 1 on the Motherboard. If it found none, it switched off within 1-2 secs of power on. Simple you say, just plug the fan into Header 1 and you're away. NOT so simple. If you use some big power fan like a Delta fan, they pull a lot of juice and can pull too much for the Mobo and burn the headers out. They are advised to be connected directly to 4 pin power connectors, but due to the BIOS feature, you don't have that option. This power problem is at least the case with KT7&KT7A mobo's. The RAID variants, for some reason can handle up to a 0.6W pull from the fans, as opposed to 0.3W for non RAID Variants.
Chances are that you WILL get a Mobo with a newer Bios installed.

BIOS.
Bloody ACPI. To gain Microsoft WHQL certification, Abit had to make the Board fully ACPI compliant. Unfortunatly, they left the drop back out of the BIOS options.
I do not like having the Board assigning the same damn IRQ to virtually every device, so I modify each BIOS update that I run to disable ACPI and give me back control of the Resources. Abit at least left that there and using Modbin, it is easy to change back.
Running a SB Live! apparantly can produce some bugs for some users, but I have had NO problems with this, probably due to the BIOS mods, assigning fixed IRQ's and using good drivers. A beta fix has just today been released for the board/chipset supposedly fixing it, but I really wouldn't worry about the problem, trivial.
That about covers it.

Oh. Try to use double-sided DIMMS, as you can get a nice speed boost on these boards by enabling 4 Bank and DRAM interleaving.


Any more questions, just post away!


Nick.

Hanslow

Thanks for the advice Nick.

I should be ordering my new components sometime next week. Already have a SB Live card in current system but fancied trying the Video Logic Sonic Fury for a change.

Will make mental note of Fan, I believe the one I am looking at is AMD approved, but as to whether it will suck the power from the board, I will have to wait and see.

Should be fun, haven't built my own PC for a while now so I'm looking forward to the good old 'why the hell does that bit not work'

Cheers again for the advice.

ScoobyDoo555

Well, I've bought it today -

A gigabyte GA-71XE4 (AMD750 AGPSet)

and an Athon GIG.....

I bought a new case too.....

Got the chip and M/Board for £185!!!

Now here's the problem -

I've set the board up (correctly I think) but when I power up, nowt. Nish. Nada.

Or to be more accurate, the system powers up (fans & hard drive), but nothing on the screen.

HELP!!!! I'm tearing my hair out

I think it's something to do with the AGP - I'm running an ATI All In Wonder 128 (Rage 128 chip)

ANY help would be greatly appreciated

BTW I've rebuilt my old machine to keep working in the meantime......

Thanks in advance,

Dan