Motherboard Suggestions

[Andy McCormack]

Hi guys,

I'm planning on building an AMD Athlon XP2800+ or 3000+ and have been out of
touch with motherboards for a bit now.

I'm currently running an Athlon T'bird 1.4ghz on an Abit KG7-Raid and have
loved this board, so would feel comfortable running another Abit. I have
also heard a huge amount of good stuff about Asus recently, you guys agree??

It will be mainly a gaming rig, and I have a Radeon 9700Pro 128mb in my
machine (currently running AGP 4x and the card is capable of 8x... D'oh!!)

So I'm asking for recommendations. Points to consider:

AMD Athlon XP 2800+ or 3000+
AGP 8x (not really a problem on new boards)
Fastest memory available (probably 512 Corsair DDR400)

I look forward to your suggestions,

TIA

Andy

 

[Jonathan Eales]

Depends on budget and whether you use the RAID capabilities.

For cheapness and non-RAID, I'd go for Asrock K7S8x at £38.50 incl. VAT from
www.dabs.com.
Asrock is a subsidiary of Asus.

For a RAID board the MSI KT6 DELTA-FIS2R for £75.50 from dabs.com again, is
fully featured. See
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1842&p=1

I've not used either but I've heard good reports from fellow builders. In
fact I was just at the local 'white box' shop and he'd just taken a big
delivery of the Asrock K7S8x and seemed to be pleased with them.

Jonathan

 

[Ancra]

Hi guys,

I'm planning on building an AMD Athlon XP2800+ or 3000+ and have been out of
touch with motherboards for a bit now.

I'm currently running an Athlon T'bird 1.4ghz on an Abit KG7-Raid and have
loved this board, so would feel comfortable running another Abit. I have
also heard a huge amount of good stuff about Asus recently, you guys agree??

It will be mainly a gaming rig, and I have a Radeon 9700Pro 128mb in my
machine (currently running AGP 4x and the card is capable of 8x... D'oh!!)

So I'm asking for recommendations. Points to consider:

AMD Athlon XP 2800+ or 3000+
AGP 8x (not really a problem on new boards)
Fastest memory available (probably 512 Corsair DDR400)

I look forward to your suggestions,

I see you've already been recommended a VIA KT600 board. This is a
feature rich chipset, and looks like good value.

For completeness sake I'm still going to also suggest nVidia dual
channel chipsets, nForce2. Like ASUS A7N8X. It's the AMD highend and
they've been around for awhile and troublefree.
For the XP3200+ you want the A7N8XX, (nForce2 400).


ancra