[ale] Desktop PC Motherboard

[Van L. Loggins]

>
>
>Message: 11
>Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 12:04:53 -0400 (GMT)
>From: Allan Neal <allanneal at earthlink.net>
>To: ale at ale.org
>Subject: [ale] Desktop PC Motherboard
>Reply-To: ale at ale.org
>
>I am needing to buy a new PC.  I usually put them together myself.  I am currently looking at which motherboard to buy.  I am looking at the Abit KD-7 and the NF-7 w/ nvidia nforce2 chipset.  I would like to stay with AMD.
>
>Any recomendations between these two motherboards or any others?
>  
>
I just recently rebuilt my personal system at home with a Epox 8RDA+ 
Nforce2 Motherboard and a Thoroughbred Revision B type cpu core AMD 
Athlon XP and I have been very happy with it. If you want a very stable 
motherboard with good features and support from the manufacturer I would 
recommend this Motherboard.

I have read that there are now Linux drivers available for this system's 
sound card and other components available on the Nvidia website. This 
adds more icing to the cake for an already awesome motherboard.

Also if you are using a thoroughbred Rev. B athlon xp cpu in your system 
this motherboard unlocks the processor if you are brave enough to want 
to overclock it. I've had my AMD Athlon XP 2400 which is clocked at 2.0 
GHz overclocked almost 200 MHz EASY!! I have a Volcano 9 Heatsink on 
mine though,also I didn't have to bump up the voltage any just set the 
fsb to 166 to match my memory and changed my multiplier to 13

I USED to be a big fan of ABIT motherboards but after my experiences 
with the KR7A-133 with the KT266A chipset I no longer have any use for 
their motherboards. I bought this board because I knew ABIT was very 
good about keeping their bios updated so you could add support for newer 
processors as they came out. I do not think it is unreasonable to expect 
them to add support for AMD Athlon XP 2200 or faster cpus up when there 
are other KT266A based motherboards that are capable of handling up to a 
2600+ out on the market. My friend has a MSI board with the same chipset 
and it's manual states supports up to a 2600. I contacted them to ask 
when they planned on releasing a new bios for my MB and got told that 
they had to plans to do so as my MB didn't support anything higher than 
a Athlon XP 2100.

Sorry to rant, this is just my 2 cents worth on the subject, at the very 
least I would say go with a Nforce2 chipset, just make sure that you are 
getting the newer version that supports a 200 MHz FSB Thorton type CPU 
so you can get a Athlon XP 3200 if you decide to later on for it. Some 
of the original Asus A7N8X Nforce2 motherboards are unable to handle the 
200 FSB processors even though Nvidia has always advertised the Nforce2 
as being capable of doing 400 MHZ FSB (200x2 FSB)

Van

_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale