Best AthlonXP motherboard

[K6-III]

I've had one MSI 745 Ultra board defective out of the box. That is one more than any Epox I've had in the same condition. My Epox's I'll use for myself, due to reliability and support (overclocking features certainly don't hurt), however they really are lacking in the AMD-based SIS chipset department. They, as a second tier manufacturer, can't really afford the raised prices VIA is threatening them with. Notice that the current SIS745 boards are made by ECS, Asus, and MSI, the biggest in the business. The addition of Aopen seems to be an anomoly of sorts...

[Tomasz]

Dr. Mordrid,
I do not doubt for one second that Via's PCI implementation is less than optimal. Both the work of George Breese and the TecChannel article clearly prove this. My point is that under "normal" usage this is pretty much irrelevent. The majority of people neither run high bandwidth editing systems nor use RAID on their systems. AFAIK onboard IDE bypasses the pci bus, so usually all that's left on the bus is a soundcard and a nic (or modem). I've played many games (JKII, NHL 2002, Dungeon Siege, Serious Sam, FIFA World Cup, etc.) over my home LAN (Linksys router/switch based) and my Audigy/Radeon 8500 128MB/KT333 system plays them absolutely smoothly in 1600x1200x32 (1024x768x32 for DS) with 16x anisotropic filtering turned on and antialiasing turned off... Furthermore, DVDs play fine, mp3s play fine, Microsoft Office XP sp2 runs fine, Visual Studio runs fine, Photoshop runs fine (except for the slightly washed out colors courtesy of ATI), Newsbin pro works fine and CDs get burned without a hitch while running all of the above... not to mention the system is incredibly stable (only one crash ever, related to a bug in ATI's catalyst drivers in the Sum of All Fears). In summary, I do not see the lack of PCI bandwidth affecting anything I care about. But different people have different requirements...

Given your long term use of VIA hardware you may not even know what you're missing.....

Sorry, I should have been more clear. I am a long time user of AOpen hardware, not Via. I have only started using Via boards recently (266A and 333 chipsets, both manufactured by AOpen). Before then, I avoided them like the plague and exclusively built and used Intel chipset based machines. In fact, my main work (non-gaming, non-tweaking, etc.) pc is still a PIII 600 on an AOpen AX6BC Pro Gold MoBo (BX chipset) with a G400 Max Dualhead setup.

As for your faith in Creative cards; this is not the experience of many other users, especially when used with VIA hardware. Creatives cards are PCI bus hogs. Combined with a VIA chipset this leaves precious little margin if another high bandwidth card is put in the mix.

All I can say is what I have seen. The cards have worked perfectly in all the Intel systems I have used and have worked perfectly in the both the AK77-333 and AK77 Pro. However, I never mixed them with RAID or video editing cards on these boards; basically just the Live! or Audigy + a Linksys NIC and . But, as I have said before, I have just started using/building AMD systems recently (and most of them using the ak77-333). Once again I am sure that there have been problems with VIA/creative combinations but I have not come across any in my limited experience.

As far as SiS is concerned, I really like what they are doing...especially their prices. I have built two systems based on the ecs k7s5a without any big issues (and they are practically giving them away at Fry's). I had a couple of DOAs with the MSI 745 based boards (probably just bad luck)...and I have not yet tried the ASUS board nor the AOpen board that has just come out.

The people who implement the chipset are more important than the chipset manufacturer themselves. One only need to experience a crappy BIOS or a lemon board to quickly learn that.

Ryu, the truth is finally spoken... there is a reason that AOpen's motherboards come to market 3 to 4 months later than the competitions... maybe they actually test their hardware and program it correctly before releasing it.

[Tomasz]

Notice that the current SIS745 boards are made by ECS, Asus, and MSI, the biggest in the business. The addition of Aopen seems to be an anomoly of sorts...

AOpen=Acer, a very large worldwide company around since 1976

[Taz]

Originally posted by Ryu Connor
The people who implement the chipset are more important than the chipset manufacturer themselves.

Er to a degree, but if a chipset has an inherent problem no amount of clever motherboard design is going to get around it.

[Evildead666]

I have no problemns with my Abit KT7A-Raid.
The highpoint controller seems to work just fine, and is as quick as can be expected for ATA-100/133. It's onboard, so 'i'm not sure whether it uses the Pci bus or not. I think it does, since it blocks the usage of one of the PCI slots if it is enabled.
(so why are there so many PCI slots, when nearly half can't be used when onboard stuff is enabled???)
Then again, i don't really play games, just work and faff around with it...

[Pace]

Yeah, agree with most of what's been said

I'd recommend he change the motherboard, but not sure what to - we'll check some UK suppliers and get back

The 2nd item I'd change would be the monitor, but then I am used to 19" NF goodness.

Volcano 7 will be a good HSF I believe? Not really worried about overclocking that much, if anything he might pump it up a few %.

Thanks for your help, I'm away for a Maths exam now

(Woohoo)

P.

PS: Not aimed at you directly EvilDead, but we are not buying Abit. I have a perfectly good Abit in this system, and a perfectly broken one somewhere between the UK and Taiwan. There's just too many bad caps stories for Abit

[RoGuE]

I'd personally go for an SiS board. My brother has just replaced his torched Asus A7M266 with an ECS K7S6A. His system has been rock solid since. Also, his RAID performance increased by around 30% too, so the PCI bandwidth is nice

Originally posted by Tomasz
.... AFAIK onboard IDE bypasses the pci bus, so usually all that's left on the bus is a soundcard and a nic (or modem.....

Integrated components such as RAID, LAN, Firewire, etc, are PCI devices, so they can't 'bypass' the PCI bus.

[Technoid]

One of our suplyers at work only carries Aopen and i have yet to recieve ONE single aopen board who hasent been DOA, POS or Several BIOS updates to work...

One one of their athlon models the onboard VGA and sound was totaly nuts on thre boards that we got in that shipment,

And the list goes on.....

We decided that we would not use aopen any more after a halfyear of POS boards....

[Ryu Connor]

Integrated components such as RAID, LAN, Firewire, etc, are PCI devices, so they can't 'bypass' the PCI bus.

Just a minor quibble, but that does depend on the board. For example nForce2 will have NIC x2, USB 2.0, Firewire 1394A, and Audio all attached to the hypertransport bus versus the PCI bus.

One of our suplyers at work only carries Aopen and i have yet to recieve ONE single aopen board who hasent been DOA

Bad batch? I know MSI shipped large number of their nForce boards with a dead or intermittent network jack initially. Even good companies screw up.

[Dr Mordrid]

Yes, it does depend on the board. On the SiS chipsets the embedded hardware is also separated from the PCI hardware.

As for the average person not pressing their hardware enough to show a problem with VIA's bandwidth issues, I disagree.

The user forums are full of users complaining about problems that scream of bus issues; everything from glitches in audio and video playback to problems with PCI disk controllers to you name it. When you check their system specs a disproportionate number of them are running VIA chipped systems. Another disproportionate group runs AMD northbridges and VIA southbridges.

If it walks like a duck and quacks.....

Dr. Mordrid

[Technoid]

I guess My Via board must be a goose

But I still recomend the SIS equipped boards since they work so flawlessly

[Dr Mordrid]

Me too. Anytime you can get decent PCI performance, stability and low cost in one package you shouldn't pass it up.

Dr. Mordrid

[az]

PCI performance might suddenly become an issue once your friend decides to get himself a TV or RAID card, for example. I'd just play it safe when it comes to stability

AZ

[Pace]

Now you guys have got me all tempted on a new SiS based system I've been planning a P4/i850/RDRAM system for a while, as it seemed like the true successor to my wonderful P2/BX system (my P3-815e I still don't like).

However, I'm really thinking about a P4/SiS/DDR or (shocker for me), an AMD chip with SiS/DDR. I've never bought an Athlon because of VIA, congratulations SiS - you really are a wonderful company (just a shame about the rather crappy SiS530 system around here ).

How long will it be till the new SiS chipsets come out?

If you've got a bit of time to spare before purchasing wait til MSI has their version of the SiS 746/963 chipseted MB's out

Sounds good to me, but I plan on upgrading in September (just finished exams, and want a solid workstation for the coming year).

Also, any reviews of Athlon+SiS vs P4+SiS vs P4+Intel around? I'm curious as to the Photoshop/video etc performance of these. I doubt any of these will have trouble compiling my little programs (although I do have trouble ).

And finally, slap me for ignorance, but would those boards make good Linux workstations as well? I'll have to dual boot Linux and Win2000 next year.

P.

[Ryu Connor]

Also, any reviews of Athlon+SiS vs P4+SiS vs P4+Intel around?

http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2002q3/sis-648/index.x?pg=1

Here's some of what you're after.

http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2002q1/via-kt333/index.x?pg=1

The rest is here.

I'm sure Anand and Tom have some round ups as well.