Motherboard Reccommendations

[Veritech]

I do quite a fair bit of amatuer audio work. I've been wanting a new
motherboard for a while now to "unlesh" the overclocking potental of my cpu.
I got about £50-60 to spend, so a cpu upgrade is pretty much out of the
question.

I know that inboard audio isn't the best thing around, and i might well be
better off buying a sound card, but a soundcard not gonna help me get to
200mhz fsb(11x200=2.2Ghz!), lol unfortunately.

I need the board to have
SPDIF in(must be in)
Overclockable chipset(ideally nf2)
AGP 8x(can't leave the radeon behind!)
SATA(with or without raid support)

The rest i'm quite open to, thanks a ton, my current hardware is listed
below
--
"Blu-Ray"
2600+Sempron (O/C @1.924Ghz)
512Mb DDR 400
9600 pro 128 (O/C @ 425/540)
Gigabyte 7VT600P-RZ mobo with 400mhz fsb
Raidmax cobra case with 420w psu
Dual 12" Blue CCFL
Blue LED fans
"Cheap and very cheerful"

 

[kony]

I do quite a fair bit of amatuer audio work. I've been wanting a new
motherboard for a while now to "unlesh" the overclocking potental of my cpu.
I got about £50-60 to spend, so a cpu upgrade is pretty much out of the
question.

I know that inboard audio isn't the best thing around, and i might well be
better off buying a sound card, but a soundcard not gonna help me get to
200mhz fsb(11x200=2.2Ghz!), lol unfortunately.

I need the board to have
SPDIF in(must be in)
Overclockable chipset(ideally nf2)
AGP 8x(can't leave the radeon behind!)
SATA(with or without raid support)

The rest i'm quite open to, thanks a ton, my current hardware is listed
below

--
"Blu-Ray"
2600+Sempron (O/C @1.924Ghz)
512Mb DDR 400
9600 pro 128 (O/C @ 425/540)
Gigabyte 7VT600P-RZ mobo with 400mhz fsb
Raidmax cobra case with 420w psu
Dual 12" Blue CCFL
Blue LED fans
"Cheap and very cheerful"

£50-60 to spend is tight. You don't mention your heatsink
but getting much further than 1.9GHz may require a better
one, else be noisey to provide adequate cooling which is
generally quite bad for those engaged in critical audio
work.

Further, getting that extra few hundred MHz out of the CPU
may not be such a great return on the $. It could even be a
bad thing to try with that power supply which is known
overrated, perhaps closer to a cheaply build 300W in
reality. First £50-60 ought to be applied towards power
supply, IMO.

You don't mention what's holding back your overclocking
either, whether it be a multipler, FSB, memory, vcore or
other limitation... and I dont' remember the defaults for a
Sempron 2600. KT600 is generally stable to at least
220MHz/DDR440, but whether that is a good return or causes
need for slower memory timings with current memory, I can't
know. Further 512MB is a bit tight for many power users
that would gain from further CPU speed, would be yet another
area to look at spending $, and in some cases be more of a
performance benefit.

Regardless, I believe one of the Abit NF7-S variants (maybe
just -S, or maybe -S2, I forget the differences but one
doesn't o'c well due to lack of adjustments) would fit this
bill, or maybe I"m wrong in that only the one that doesn't
o'c has the SATA equipped southbridge. Given your
propensity towards audio already it seems you already know
that ideally a sound card is the better solution for that.
It seems a bit like you're trying to squeeze the budget too
tight, that if we could have it all for dirt-cheap, of
course nobody would spend more.

 

[kony]

Thanks for the concern, i seem to get that from everyone(psu comment) I
don't blame ya for saying that but although the supply might not actually be
a true 420w psu its does its job, the day it doesn't, i'll replace it.

So you don't mind it damaging the other parts in the system?
To clarify, it might be holding back overclocking already,
and it may already be damaging the system, progressively.

Concerning my O/C'ing i failed to do enough researching into o/c'ing before
i bought the motherboard, so i ended up with one that didn't have a pci
lock. Because of that i can't really take the board above a few mhz before
it causes all the system to lock up.

Post specifics.
As I wrote, it's stable up to 220MHz. I mean, STABLE, you
do not have a problem with PCI lock if you can't even hit
220 stable, rather you have some other problem which another
motherboard most likely will not solve..

I hadn't running fairly stable at 187
but when your working a crash is the last thing you want, so i backed it
down to 169 where the pci/agp is at 34/67.

Why? I mean, there was no good reason to even try running
it at 187 was there? Try 200. Try past 200. It is
important to get it to 200 and beyond because that uses a
higher PCI divisor.

You do realize that within limits, it is a GOOD THING to not
have a PCI lock? On pre-PCI Express boards, PCI bus can be
one of the largest bottlnecks. If the PCI bus isn't locked,
bumping it up to 35MHz is too slight to be a problem for
(almost any hardware) but does improve performance of that
most bottlenecked bus.

Thanks to more fans than i have wads of cash(4x 80mm fans! plus a dual fan
psu and cpu cooler!!) i system sounds like a jet, cool jet, but a jet, i
sorta like it that way lol. Gives the pc presence! I had planned to
initially buy a nice nf7-S2.0 along with a zalman flower copy(from pc cooler
i think) But now realize that its better that i spend the cash trying to
kill 2 birds with one stone rather than endulge in the glory of pure
overclocking.

What's the default multiplier on your CPU and is it
multiplier-locked? Given your PC3200 memory you should aim
for 200MHz FSB and forget about the motherboard
replacement... unless there are significant other needs it
would fulfill.

 

[Veritech]

Thanks for the concern, i seem to get that from everyone(psu comment) I
don't blame ya for saying that but although the supply might not actually be
a true 420w psu its does its job, the day it doesn't, i'll replace it.

Concerning my O/C'ing i failed to do enough researching into o/c'ing before
i bought the motherboard, so i ended up with one that didn't have a pci
lock. Because of that i can't really take the board above a few mhz before
it causes all the system to lock up. I hadn't running fairly stable at 187
but when your working a crash is the last thing you want, so i backed it
down to 169 where the pci/agp is at 34/67.

Thanks to more fans than i have wads of cash(4x 80mm fans! plus a dual fan
psu and cpu cooler!!) i system sounds like a jet, cool jet, but a jet, i
sorta like it that way lol. Gives the pc presence! I had planned to
initially buy a nice nf7-S2.0 along with a zalman flower copy(from pc cooler
i think) But now realize that its better that i spend the cash trying to
kill 2 birds with one stone rather than endulge in the glory of pure
overclocking.

Thanks anyhow