Motherboard

[The_King]

I need you opinions on an AMD motherboard. I'm planning on upgrading to a 2100+ with pc2700 RAM. I want a relatively cheap motherboard. I'm deciding from the following:

Soltek SL-75DRV5
ASUS A7S333
GygaByte GA-7VRX
EPOX 8K3A

These are all around my price range.(There may be other motherboards that ive missed...)

Thanks for your help.

[Dr Mordrid]

Two other boards you should have under consideration;

ECS K7S6A (K7S7A coming soon)

MSI 745 Ultra

Both are SiS 745 boards like the Asus A7S333. The MSI has a few more features than the K7S6A but the ECS board is cheaper. The Asus A7S333 is likewise a higher end SiS 745 board.

I've found the SiS 745 boards have very wide PCI bandwidth, much unlike the VIA chipped boards, and are VERY stable. The high PCI bandwidth vs. VIA is a major advantage of the SiS based boards for both the Athlon and the P4.

Another is a very wide bus between the north and south bridges and multithreaded I/O for PCI devices. The combination gives them a large advantage when using high bandwidth hardware in a system.

I recently used a Gigabyte GA-7VRX KT333 system during the Matrox RT.X100 realtime board beta. While the feature set of the GA-7VRX was great, which is typical for Gigabyte boards, it was hindered badly by the VIA KT333 chipset. The PCI bandwidth was, as usual for VIA chipsets, very limited which caused a lot of problems with the RT.X100.

My experience, and those of others using the VIA chipsets, resulted in VIA based mainboard being removed from the approved list for the RT.X100. This because of the PCI problems.

When the GA-7VRX died (killed by a shorted memory module) I replaced it with a Gigabyte GA-7DX+ which uses the AMD 760. This worked much better.

I cannot speak to the Epox and Soltek boards from experience, but their use of the VIA KT333 chipset leaves me very cold.

My recommendation: go for one of the SiS 745 based boards.

Dr. Mordrid

[The_King]

I had a look at a review here and the soltek was the best performing mobo....

[Dr Mordrid]

Very few reviewers measure PCI bandwidth because doing it properly requires specialized hardware and more skills than most of them can muster. As such they usually depend on software benchmarks that end up only testing the CPU and memory bandwidth.

These are important to be sure, but they are not fully reflective of total system performance. In point of fact they are virtually useless for predicting how well a system will work when stressed by cards that have to push massive bitrates rough the PCI bus.

PCI bandwidth is very often the major factor in many of the major device confilcts you read about, particularly on VIA systems that have high bandwidth devices like editing cards, certain NIC's or sound cards installed. These things eat PCI bandwidth like crazy, and if you have more than one in a VIA system trouble usually ensues.

In my experience when the combined PCI bus throughput of all the active devices in a system starts getting close to 90 mb/s VIA systems saturate and system hiccups occur. This is much easier to do than you might think, especially if there are poorly written device drivers present that force the issue.

On the other hand SiS, AMD and Intel chipsets very often can push close to 110 mb/s through the PCI bus. They are much better for systems where the PCI bus will be stressed by high bandwidth cards.

That seemingly slight margin makes all the difference when it comes to the system performing a bus intensive task smoothly or having the contention for resources cause problems.

Systems that would require this kind of performance would be those used for multimedia creation and playback, video editing, high end audio editing or as servers.

Dr. Mordrid

[The_King]

I couldnt find ECS K7S6A here in Aus, only ECS K7S5A.