New motherboard, advice

  • Thread starter Thread starter Krystan Honour
  • Start date Start date
K

Krystan Honour

Hi there,

Three or now nearly four years ago I bought an asus a7a266 and based
my system around it. I am very happy with it, however times change and
I now want to retire this board and go for new memory processor and
obviously a board.

I play games mostly on it and just want to keep abreast of the current
tech ( I'm like that)

I want to go the amd processor route again much preferring this to
intel offerings and have done some quick (I mean quick) looking into
new boards
from asus, I have seen the A7V600 and this looks mighty nice.

If anyone has any experience with this board could they post and let
me know or is there perhaps a better board here. I change my board
around once every 3 years so I'm looking for something that will do me
well.

Thanks in advance


Krystan
 
Krystan said:
Hi there,

Three or now nearly four years ago I bought an asus a7a266 and based
my system around it. I am very happy with it, however times change and
I now want to retire this board and go for new memory processor and
obviously a board.

I play games mostly on it and just want to keep abreast of the current
tech ( I'm like that)

I want to go the amd processor route again much preferring this to
intel offerings and have done some quick (I mean quick) looking into
new boards
from asus, I have seen the A7V600 and this looks mighty nice.

If anyone has any experience with this board could they post and let
me know or is there perhaps a better board here. I change my board
around once every 3 years so I'm looking for something that will do me
well.
Click to expand...

The nForce2 chipset is widely acclaimed as the best. I have the A7N8X
Deluxe with a Barton 2500+ and am extremely pleased with it and all of the
onboard peripherals. The SoundStorm is pretty good - better than the
SBLive! I had, and the Dolby encoding is an excellent feature if you have a
decoder and lots of speakers :-)

The RAM I have is Corsair 3200LL (2*512MB) which will reach speeds of 220MHz
with 7-2-2-2 timings, which is about as agggressive as it gets. It's best
to have FSB and Ram running at the same speed on the nForce2, but although
new Bartons are multiplier locked, you can usually run the FSB of a 2500+ at
200MHz with RAM in synch for a 3200+.

Ben
 
=|[ Krystan Honour's ]|= said:
Hi there,

Three or now nearly four years ago I bought an asus a7a266 and based
my system around it. I am very happy with it, however times change and
I now want to retire this board and go for new memory processor and
obviously a board.

I play games mostly on it and just want to keep abreast of the current
tech ( I'm like that)

I want to go the amd processor route again much preferring this to
intel offerings and have done some quick (I mean quick) looking into
new boards
from asus, I have seen the A7V600 and this looks mighty nice.

If anyone has any experience with this board could they post and let
me know or is there perhaps a better board here. I change my board
around once every 3 years so I'm looking for something that will do me
well.

Thanks in advance


Krystan
Click to expand...

Like Ben says, the nForce2 chipset is hard to beat now. Against the KT333
and 400's it wins most benchmarks by anywhere from 5 to 20 percent. Asus's
implementations of it, a7n8x range are held to be excellent too.

I see the KT600 based A7V600 is a cheaper alternative. Its not quite at
nForce2 performance but around 95% there, its like a beefed up KT333 that
does the full 400fsb&Mem setting. Its sound may be weaker and doesnt have
the gaming acceleration features that some nForce2 boards have either.
Ive seen asus's A7V600 bench a little under par compared to other boards
with the same chipset ~ could be a bios thing.

Whichever you choose, your upgrade may lack the wow factor because youll be
hard pressed to get twice the performance out of what you can squeeze out
of the a7a266 already by running a cheap athlonXP on it.

These boards wont be up with the current tek for long now, the upgrade path
seems very limited on them (compared to your old boards working life) - It
might be worth holding on some months for an Opteron workstation (?)
 
What Ben said! I basically have his same setup. The 2500+ Bartons are
starting to come with the multiplier locked now, so try to find one that is
not if you can.
I have the A7N8X Deluxe with a Barton core 2500+ running at 200 MHz FSB with
good ram, and run the ram in sync with the FSB, So I have the equilivant of
a 3200+ for a fraction of the price.
HOWEVER, if you have deep pockets (and I do mean deep, cpu alone runs about
700 bucks. I am going to use what I have now until the prices drop on the
new AMD chip) I would get the AMD FX-51 on an Asus SK8N It would be
expensive, but the upgrade path might be a little better since this is AMD's
new chip. It is a 64 bit chip and really hauls a$$
Good Luck,
The first option is probably the best cost wise, but if I had the cash I
would do the second.
Bitsbucket
 
Yeah... I am using nothing but nforce2 boards now. Good performance and
Stability!
When I went from my older KT333 motherboard though to the nforce, I ended up
copying my HD onto
a new HD, and after rebooting, found I needed to do a repair install of XP
to get it running again
because of the differences in the chipset. Afterwhich, everything is rock
solid.
Might wanna consider something with s-ata too. You know... even the Shuttle
motherboards..AN35N Ultra 400 was like $80 for me and rock solid too.

Jeff
 
Ok what I have now done is to buy a cheap processor and wait for a bit.

Thanks to all those for advice .. most helpful

krys
 
Back
Top