Motherboards

[anisah]

I have been asked to build a relatively cheap computer for the son of a friend and am thinking of using an Elite motherboard.

Does anyone have any advice or experience of these boards?

It would be a socket A, with 200mhz/266mhz FSB; probably with an AMD Duron 1GHZ processor, 128MB RAM (DIMM PC133), 40GB hdd, and separate AGP graphics and sound, as I do not believe in the use of onboard chipsets!

Any comments would be welcome - as the maximum for the whole system, including the monitor is about £500.

Thanks in advance.

Anisah

 

[floppybootstomp]

anisah:

Here's a suggested system to suit your budget. The mobo has onboard AC97 audio, which is fine but you can disable it and I've included a soundcard in the list. I sourced all this stuff from www.ebuyer.com. I'm not suggesting you follow the list rigidly, but it's a guide. For another £60.00 or so you could use an Athlon XP CPU. All prices listed exclude VAT but it's been added at the end of the list.

ECSK7S5A Motherboard, 133 FSB, DDR/SDR RAM, on board audio - £41.78

Duron 1Ghz CPU - £38.35

Coolermaster DP5 7H53F CPU Cooler - £5.74

Nokia Style ATX Midi Tower Case, 300W PSU - £18.06

Philips 107E 17" Monitor - £99.46

128MB DDR PC2100 RAM - £36.75

IBM Deskstar 40Gb 7200 Hard Disk - £65.07

Prolink Geoforce Ti 64MB DDR TV Out Vid card - £67.14

Sound Blaster PCI 128 Sound Card - £12.53

Logitech Internet Navigator Keyboard - £18.94

Logitech 3 button Mouse - £8.51

PCI 56K Internal Hardware Modem - £7.90

Net: £420.23

VAT: £73.54

Total: £493.77

Oops, forgot a CD ROM drive and a floppy disk drive. Add about £25.00 for a CD ROM drive and £8.00 for a floppy drive = £33.00 +

Total: £526.77

OK, that's a little over £500.00, but there are areas you could save on. You could go for a 15" Monitor instead of a 17"; SDR RAM instead of DDR; not use a sound card, use the onboard sound; get a cheaper keyboard & mouse; a lower specced video card, etc, etc.

Anyway, for £500.00 worth of parts and putting the thing together, I'd probably charge about £650.00 (no, I don't do it for a living).

As I said, not written in stone but I hope it gives you some ideas.

Good luck!

 

[Ian]

Wow flops, thats a pretty good PC you priced up there!!! 17" monitor for £100 - I payed £300 not even 2 years ago!

 

[muckshifter]

Hello & welcome Anisah

Not a bad "spec" there from Flopps, and yep, can get a reasonable 17" monitor for around £117 + VAT.

You could opt for a lesser AGP video card & get a gForce 2 MX400 32mb for around £38 + VAT will play ALL the games out there at the moment.

I would lean towards 256Mb of memory but as is creeping up at the moment a 128 stick will do, add another stick later ASAP.

Any other questions then please fire away.

 

[james]

Pssstt...Psssttttt

just watching

 

[floppybootstomp]

James:

Uh, yes, of course *cough* ahem, erm, etc. And there was me thinking 'ECS' was an entity. I overlooked the fact the 'E' from ECS stood for Elite.

Silly old me :crazy:

I'm going to allow myself the luxury of an edit methinks

 

[muckshifter]

Flops

hehe .. that cought both of us out ... When I went looking for the BIOS update I could not figure out why I couldn't find it?

Google found it after I typed in the board number. :spin:

 

[TheHeretic]

Dunno if you guys can get em over there but Shuttle makes some decent "entry level" boards. I have built a system for the wife with one and it has given me the least amount of trouble of any board I have used.

Also FIC has some pretty decent cheap Audio onboard motherboards.


TheHeretic

 

[muckshifter]

TH ... We sure can

But in a limited supply. Just passed on an FIC 2013 still going strong. Innit Flopps.

 

[floppybootstomp]

Re: TH ... We sure can

Originally posted by muckshifter
Just passed on an FIC 2013 still going strong. Innit Flopps.

Ummmmmm...... no.

That's actually the board that suffered a lot of peculiar quirks and staged it's final demise by taking out an internal PCI modem and a new Muse sound card.

I managed to exchange the sound card as faulty with it's supplier, CCL, and you sent me a spare modem - remember?

It turned out the RAM was up the creek as well.

You did warn me there was something up with it, and I still apreciate you giving them to me. The CPU was OK though, I got that overclocked to 500 in a system right now. Using a FOP32 on it.

Sorry, Mr Mucks

On the subject of FIC motherboards, I still got a FIC 403+ going strong after 4 years or so. Has 2 sticks of 128MB 66Mhz RAM and a K6-2 300 CPU.

I would still buy a FIC mobo, I think they're good.

 

[muckshifter]

oops

Ah, yes, err, I remember now.

Yes I did say Nettie was having problems with it, well they were a pretty reasonable board.

 

[wildone]

Re: Re: TH ... We sure can

Originally posted by floppybootstomp


Ummmmmm...... no.

That's actually the board that suffered a lot of peculiar quirks and staged it's final demise by taking out an internal PCI modem and a new Muse sound card.

I managed to exchange the sound card as faulty with it's supplier, CCL, and you sent me a spare modem - remember?

It turned out the RAM was up the creek as well.

You did warn me there was something up with it, and I still apreciate you giving them to me. The CPU was OK though, I got that overclocked to 500 in a system right now. Using a FOP32 on it.

Sorry, Mr Mucks

On the subject of FIC motherboards, I still got a FIC 403+ going strong after 4 years or so. Has 2 sticks of 128MB 66Mhz RAM and a K6-2 300 CPU.

I would still buy a FIC mobo, I think they're good.

I got a bad FIC board that caused me probs ,but the RMA was stable without probs ,I just got one from a bad batch I guess ,it fried the ram that I put in the board.

wildone

 

[nmorgan]

buy elite boards with confidence very stable and cheep.if you hang on they are bringing out the kt333 chipset very fast,if not buy the k7s6a for about 60 quid

 

[floppybootstomp]

Wonder what happened to Anisah? (the starter of this thread)

 

[IanH]

Are these forums biased ?

All i have seen so far on a lot of hardware forums is that everone appears to be biased towards AMD and "Let's forget Intel and its soo slow P4"

Yours Disappointed

Ian

 

[Ian]

Hi Ian,

We are not Anti-Intel at all! Infact, at the moment Intel have a VERY good option with the 1.6A/1.8A.

My personal preference at the moment would be AMD for home systems at the moment, as they perform better (per £) than games, where as Intel I'd most certainly use in my server (you cant really go wrong stability wise with an Intel Chipset / Intel CPU)

What makes you say we're anti Intel? Just curious

From another Ian

 

[floppybootstomp]

bias?

Good question, IanH. I wouldn't say the whole Forum is biased against Intel but I must confess I probably am. You'll notice the starter of this thread specified a budget and system specs. To keep within those limits an AMD based system seemed the most logical choice.

Pentium based systems are OK, they're very stable and fine if you want a stock standard reliable system. But as you are probably aware, a Pentium 4 processor costs a lot more than it's AMD XP equivalent.

And AMD CPU's are lottsa fun to overclock

The above is purely my opinion, feel free to agree or disagree, and to repeat, no, PC Review is not biased against Pentium 4 users.

 

[wildone]

Yeah but I must say stability on an AMD system has came a long way in the last couple of years,check this out,not to bad for a 1 gig chip oced to 1550 and a via chipset ,the most scary part ,is this is a windows based PC

Wildone

 

[IanH]

Bias ?

Hi again, ok point taken regarding AMD, I did have an Athlon XP 1800 but after several breakdowns, I went back to my P3 800. I got through 17 XP 1800's in 2 weeks before I was informed that a faulty batch had been imported from Malaysia without being tested prior to disribution.

Those gripes aside. shortly I will be upgrading to a P4 1.8ghz Northwood with 512mb PC333 DDR and an MSI 645 Ultra, the whole lot will cost me £367 from Komplett.

As for overclocking, with the Abit SD7 533 board you can push a P4 1.6ghz to just over 3ghz with extra cooling. And the new P4 2.54ghz is made for overclocking, you can overclock the 533 FSB to 1064 using PC2700 (PC333) DDR.

One final note, why is it my GeForce-3 Ti200 on the Epox 6VBA board with the latest Via 4-in-1 drivers cannot be used with AGP Fast Write enabled and I have to resort to 2X mode as the Epox refuses to boot otherwise, strange one that.

 

[Ian]

Re: Bias ?

Originally posted by IanH
As for overclocking, with the Abit SD7 533 board you can push a P4 1.6ghz to just over 3ghz with extra cooling. And the new P4 2.54ghz is made for overclocking, you can overclock the 533 FSB to 1064 using PC2700 (PC333) DDR.

I've heard of a few reports of 1.6 > 3Ghz overclocking, but not with air cooling. Have you got any links to sites with that on, cos I'd be interested in reading that (almost 100% overclock ).

I must admit, I dont understand the 533 to 1064 bus increase with the 2.54Ghz P4?