what's the best motherboard for amd athlon 64

[Mike Henley]

My experience; I think it's probably a tie between the MSI k8t and the
ASUS k8v. The reason I chose those rather than others is simple, both
support cool'n'quiet. Does anyone know any other motherboard that
supports cool'n'quiet?

I have tried both. And here is my experience.
1. The MSI has the advantage of dynamic overclocking, which will
automatically overclock the CPU depending on your usage needs, ASUS
doesn't have this feature, though you can overclock manually in the
bios. I'm not entirely sure that dynamic overclocking is pretty stable
to use. I had stability problems with with hindsight now i think they
were due to the PC-Cillin antivirus 2002.
2. ASUS has a green motherboard LED which i found quite useful when
installing the motherboard and checking out what could be going wrong.
The MSI motherboard doesn't.
3. The ASUS bios chip is socketed, the MSI motherboard soldered. A BIG
BIG BIG plus for ASUS, a minus for MSI.
4. ASUS motherboard also had BIOS specific recovery features. MSI
doesn't.
5. The ASUS hardware and software exuded solid quality, the MSI felt
rather cheap.
6. The CPU on the ASUS fits in a more central location than the MSI,
which in case you're using accessories like a CPU fan duct, it'd work
out well. The MSI's CPU socket is located out towards the edge of the
motherboard, which seems unconventional and may cause problems if
you're buying modding accessories.
7. The MSI is less expensive than the ASUS, but the difference in
quality is evident; with the ASUS, you get what you pay for, and
that's high quality.

Overall, I prefer the ASUS. Dynamic overclocking of the MSI is nice,
but hey, who cares; the athlon 64 is fast already, and better have
something stable rather than marginally fast.

 

[Fitz]

Another board to consider is the Gigabyte K8NNXP. It supports Cool n' Quiet.
I couldn't get it to run stable with Kingston HyperX PC 3200, but have since
heard rumors of some mislabeling with that memory. Went to Mushkin Level 1
PC 3500 and it runs great. Has a backup BIOS, SATA and ATA RAID, and a dual
power system. Firewire is 1394b. Dual LAN. Assembly was easy and the board
seems well made. BIOS has a "best performance" setting which provides a mild
OC (FSB 208 MHz, Memory 416 MHz, Hypertransport 1248 MHz). Product support
is marginal. A good forum to look at is:
http://forums.amd.com/index.php? Scroll down to the AMD64 section and you
can read quite a bit about peoples experience with different boards.

Fitz

 

[Wes Newell]

My experience; I think it's probably a tie between the MSI k8t and the
ASUS k8v. The reason I chose those rather than others is simple, both
support cool'n'quiet. Does anyone know any other motherboard that
supports cool'n'quiet?

Best is just a point of view. It just needs work. I'm quite happy with my
S755Max from Jetway. And it also supports Cool n' Quiet with the latest
bios. Also supports overclocking, sata raid and ata raid.