Motherboard Recommendaions

[Galuska]

I am planning on purchasing a G400 Max or maybe even a RT2000 a bit later. I would like to know if there are any motherboards that you guys can suggest to give good speed, stability, etc.?

I have 3 ABIT BH6 machines right now with various Celeron processors. The ABIT has been a real pain dealing with power supply issues. I do appreciate any input.

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[Parabellum]

Hi,

What chipet do you want? i440BX, i820, i810, i810-E, i840?...

What processor do you want to run on it?

If you still want to stick with the BX chipset, i recommend you the AOpen AX6BC Pro II Millenium edition or the MSI BXMaster (wich I asked some questions about it in the general hardware forum) wich seems quite good.

If you do not want to upgrade to another BX motherboard, then I strongly suggest you to wait before buying ANY i820 based motherboard, simply dur to RDRAM issue.

my 2 cents,

Parabellum

[Goc]

Well... I recommend ABIT, because your PS problems are a mistery to me. I use only ABIT mobo's for building systems and have never had a single problem with them (OK, some mem problems but those were bad DIMM's from a no/name taiwan manufacturer so it doesn't really count,eh?)
Did it occur to you that you might be having problems due to overclocking Celerys, because I would be very surprised if you run celeron processors on an ABIT BH6 and don't overclock them... Also, how about bad PSUs?
Anyway, if you have a thing against ABIT, try that AOpen AX6BC Pro II mobo that Parabellum is talking about...

just my SQRT0.0001 $

Goc

[Kristian]

Be a sucker like me and buy a i820 board

doh!

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Striving for perfection

[Goc]

Kristian... -= LOL =-

Did you get the guy that pushed you into buying the bastard board?

[ALBPM]

Go get em Goc....LOL


Paul

[paulcs]

It's a funny time to be buying a motherboard. You have a ton of options, and I suspect all of them have a downside.

BX boards have been around for about two years now. The technology is sound, and there are a lot of good boards available.

I have personal experience with the AOpen board mentioned earlier, and, in my experience, the hype turns out to be accurate. Style points aside, and the board was designed to look nice, the board's great strength is its stability. Overclocking stability is extremely good.

The board does what it does so well, that there is a tendency to dwell on its negatives. Voltage and the FSB speed can be manipulated in the BIOS, although one of the new Abit or MSI boards will give you a better selection of speeds to choose from. AOpen uses an unusual temperature and fan monitoring system. This is a PCI-only solution. There are no ISA slots. I would have like to have seen another fan power jack on the board. The floppy driver connector is in a very funny place.

I've heard nothing but good things about the MSI board as well. It, apparently, is also a nice stable board, and it is very feature rich.

The problem with any aging technology, of course, is that it tends to get superceded by newer technology--and that's what's happening right now.

As far as I'm concerned, all the newer chipsets, both from Intel and VIA, are unacceptable. The i820 appears to be a complete disaster, and i810 is a Mickey Mouse solution, an e-machine motherboard that just happens to support some very fast CPU's.

I've read some relatively negative stuff about the new VIA chipsets. They appear to be a bit buggy and not the most stable boards in the world. This is to be expected, as the technology is very new.

If you intend to stick with your Celerons or move up to the 100 MHz front side bus, I'd go with a BX board. If you intend to upgrade to a 133 MHz CPU, you might want to wait a couple of months.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[The PIT]

I stand up a little bit for Via I woundn't say there chipsets are unstable rather that there drivers arn't tested properly before being released (Excluding new bits of hardware it hard to test what you haven't seen).
If you want an easier life go for Intel if you like a challenge go for a Via.

[Gurm]

Sorry to disagree with you PIT, but the SS7 chipsets are unstable, as are MOST motherboards with the new chipsets. *sigh*

This does NOT include the VIA133, which seems by all acccounts to be remarkably stable.

Anyway, to also disagree with Goc... I have abandoned Abit for good. When an Abit board works, it works well and there is no denying their role as the ultra-overclockers. However, if you want stability and performance, the Asus P3B-F cannot be beat. 6PCI, 1ISA, 4DIMM, fully compliant ACPI, lots of options, voltage and speed in BIOS and on Jumpers...

And very very VERY VERY stable.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[mkaresh]

I have had very good luck with a Soyo SY6BA+IV. Very stable up to 138mhz, up to 150mhz if you don't need AGP.

The only problem I'm having is I can't get DMA enabled on IDE 1 and 2 in W98 (fine in W2k), so I had to put my DVD drive on IDE 4. No problem now, but may limit expansion later. But there will probably be a fix later too.

As for the Max, I now have one, but the gclock doesn't overclock well. I get black squares in the pavement and walls in the Adventure scenes of 3dmark2000. (And no, this isn't because I've overclocked the MB, because the same thing happens at 100fsb.) I thnk the h/s of the Max is too small. The RAM does very well, good to about 225, but RAM doesn't appear to affect my 3dmark scores as much as gclock.

As far as actual game performance, a stock G400 seems quite nice. These G400s really like fast CPUs.

So a vanilla might make more sense. Then again, the Max isn't that much more than a retail vanilla these days.

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PIII 500e @667
Soyo SY6BA+IV
Iwill Slotket II
G400 32MB Max
Nokia 445Xi 21"
and POS 14"
Aureal Vortex Superquad
128MB PC133
IBM DPTA 20.5GB 7200rpm
Toshiba 8/40 DVD

[The PIT]

Sorry one or two reviews I've seen of the Via 133 mention the dreaded lines can you remember the early days of ss7 and agp.
I'll quote my last line again.
If you want a nice stable life go for Intel if you want a challenge go for Via.

I found it amusing when I had a via chipset that I had to use Microsoft drivers to get my zip drive and tape drive to work. Via's drivers always screwed up.

[Dyre]

I would like to get a VIA, but WTF is up with having to patch a DAMN MOTHERBOARD. Akk i just dont dig that.. i ditched my SS7 board when i got the MAX.

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PIII 450 @ 504
generic BX motherboard
G400 MAX : )
Maxtor 13 gig UDMA 33
Maxtor 13 gig UDMA 66
Creative 36x CD-ROM
HP 2x2x6x CD-RW
64 megs PC100 RAM
128 megs PC133 ECC RAM
NetGear 10/100
Soundblaster 32 AWE
Diamond SupraExpress 56k
Logitech Wireless Desktop (best $50 ive ever spent)
1 92mm Sunon Fan
4 80mm Sunon Fan's

[paulcs]

I've heard the AOpen VIA 133 is a very stable board. I've read some discouraging stuff about overclocking stability, and I get the feeling a lot of people who will jump on this chipset the moment it becomes available are looking for "adventure."

I don't want to seem like I'm down on VIA. I think it's a bad idea to buy into a chipset that's only been around for a month or two. Look at Intel's LX chipset. Early implementations of the board appear to have a number of problems, not the least being underpowering the AGP slot. We've seen issues with a few Matrox boards, and, apparently, LX boards often respond poorly the the power hungry GeForce.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[jeepman]

I have an ABIT BP6 dual Celeron board that is BX based. If you put thermal paste on the oversized BX heatsink, and get decent h/s fans for the CPU's you have a nice stable board, that gives you the option of running dual in Win2K. I know almost every game is not dual optimized, but the second CPU, under OS control is nice to have for processing background tasks, such as a SETI unit!

I am waiting for a final answer on which FC-PGA PIII CPU's currently are SMP capable and I will buy two of them. I will also get the Power Leap FC-PGA convertors so I can use them on my BP6. The only remaining issue would be a BIOS that supports the PIII Cu 256KB cache.

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ABIT BP6, 192MB PC100 RAM, dual 366->>550MHz, 3DFXCool GlobalWin FEP32 'Lil Mofo' h/s fans. G400 DH, 3COM 905B NIC, Buslogic FlashPoint LW Ultra-Wide SCSI, SBLive PCI 1024. Segate Medalist PRO 9.1 GB UW SCSI 7200RPM, Maxtor 20.4GB ATA66 7200RPM 2MB Cache, 8GB tape b/u, IDE 32x CDROM, SCSI 4xwrite/8xread Panasonic CD writer, 4 more various 2GB SCSI drives.

[Goc]

Gurm...

Well I can't disagree with you... ASUS P3B-F is one helluva board. I personally don't like ASUS, but I don't know why (maybe because they are being pushed as the best board manuf. around, and the little anarchist in me doesn't want to agree with all the rest. Maybe it's their, to put it mildly, "strange" marketing regarding Slot A and their K7M board).
To say it again, I never, ever had any problems with an ABIT board... Maybe I'm just darn lucky, or there is more to it

Oh, yeah.. Gurm, no flames pleeeaseee