Motherboard question ....TIA

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E5I5O

I am looking at building my first system and have owned HP's, Packard Bells,
and so on in the past and now want a system that will work as I need it. I
know that I want to run an ATI All In Wonder Pro 9800 Series AGP card, and a
Pioneer DVR A07 DVD RW, but I am looking for a motherboard that will have a
max processor speed of at least 2.8 Ghz with at least 1 Gig of memory I
found an Intel piece but I am not impressed with Intel, and I know very
little about AMD other then they rock! What is the best AMD Processor for my
design and are there faster processors out there from AMD? Thanks again!

E5
 
E5I5O said:
I am looking at building my first system and have owned HP's, Packard Bells,
and so on in the past and now want a system that will work as I need it. I
know that I want to run an ATI All In Wonder Pro 9800 Series AGP card, and a
Pioneer DVR A07 DVD RW, but I am looking for a motherboard that will have a
max processor speed of at least 2.8 Ghz with at least 1 Gig of memory I
found an Intel piece but I am not impressed with Intel, and I know very
little about AMD other then they rock! What is the best AMD Processor for my
design and are there faster processors out there from AMD? Thanks again!

E5
Click to expand...

Well your best value (best "bang for buck") right now would be at 333FSB
Athlon XP 2800+. The best motherboard would be just about any full-size ATX
board with the nforce2 chipset, such at Epox 8RDA3I. That board will
support up to a 3200+ running at 400FSB, and probably higher speeds with a
BIOS update. It will also go up to 3Gig of RAM. If you go with an athlon
64 mainboard, you will get support up to 3400+ or better at 64 bits. BUT,
your CPU for an athlon64 mainboard will cost better than two hundred bucks
all by itself. You'd be better off to spend the extra money on a
high-quality power supply like a ~400W Seasonic model.

Don't skimp on the power supply or the RAM. That's the best advice I could
offer to a new builder. Go with 1Gig (2 X 512MB) of RAM to start, and
choose a good name-brand like Kingston, Mushkin or Crucial. With the right
power supply and right RAM, you could choose just about any
processor/mainboard combo and end up with a system that will be MUCH better
than any pre-built system such as your HP and Packard Bells. -Dave
 
Thank you very much for the information! I have considered spending the
extra money on the power supply looking into 450 Watt supplies. Being I am
very familar with electronics with 15 years in the business as an assembler.
I only decided to build just recently finding so many limitations with the
latest system I own (the HP), being the fourth computer I have owned in the
past few years. I really found myself disappointed with the performance
after installing a Toshiba SDR5002 DVD - RW. Of course I do kind of feel the
OS has a lot of shortcomings as well being Windows ME. In short I found my
girlfriend's custom built system to out run my system after installing
Windows XP in her machine. Sadly my HP requires I purchase and install a new
BIOS and a host of other upgrades just to install the new OS, which I feel
is a bad marketing idea with HP. Where in my older Packard Bells (any of the
three I owned) upgrading the OS was never a problem.

Getting back to the facts at hand I have been considering an Intel MB (the
D865PERLX) with a 3.0 GHz processor and 800 MHz system bus. But given the
facts of how poorly my Pentium III system runs now while trying to handle
simple video editing makes me leery of the board and chipset to say the
least.The Intel unit is though able to accept 4 Gigs of system DDR Memory.
Which leads me to one more question on the subject of AMD MBs. Is there any
AMD boards out there that support that much memory? I am not looking at
price as much as I believe I can hold out another six months for this system
to be complete. Luck for me I have a case already, though I have to install
a new power supply dumping the old and laughable 250 Watt supply for the
time being. Though I am fairly new to the video editing for the most part I
have had my ATI All In Wonder Pro 128 card in my HP (though not compatible
with Windows XP) for about three years now. I have been very impressed with
the board and its features. While I am considering moving the present DVD RW
into my girlfriend's computer and getting the dual format for myself, I have
followed AMD information over the past few years and find that they build a
rock solid processor with speeds exceeding that of the Intel. In all this I
have to say size does matter as it were (lol). Thanks again for the insight.

Sincerely, E5
 
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