Suggested Socket 939 Motherboard...

[leech]

So I may be upgrading my motherboard, processor and ram soon. Going with the AMD Athlon 64, socket 939. The question is, what motherboard/chipsets are good? This is the first PC I'm going to build that is non-Intel... I always stuck with Intel, because I've always heard of (and had problems with) other people's computers with different chipsets. From what I could see, Asus only has one socket 939 motherboard, the A8V. It uses the Via K8T800 Chipset. Is this good, or should I go with the nforce3 250gb chipset (I didn't see an Asus motherboard with that.) I generally buy Asus boards, because I like their features and they are very stable.

Any suggestions? I'll be putting an Athlon 64 3000+ (90nm) CPU in it. Of course, I suppose the real question is, how much faster will this be than my 3.06ghz Pentium 4 (with 533mhz FSB)?

Leech

[rylan]

Believe it or not I've heard good things about the K8T800 chipset. And the Asus Athlon boards have been quite good. Oddly enough I also found that Soyo made some good boards for Athlon in their Dragon Platinum series.

[leech]

It'll probably be a few weeks before I order everything for this. Thanks for the input. I've read that the 90nm Athlon 64's can be overclocked up to 45%! So I'll be needing a monster heat sink probably too... but that'll wait 'til the mainboard is picked out...

Leech

[Mehen]

What are you going to do with your old 3.06? I may be interested for the right price...

[leech]

More than likely, it's being sold to someone I work with.... along with the motherboard, ram and the Thermalright heatsink I put on it... I had to replace the stock Intel heatsink because the fan was whining all the time...

Leech

[rylan]

Oh, remember to get some good low latency memory for your Athlon. They perform better with lower latency versus cranking the bus speed up.

[Fluff]

Any 939 boards come with 4 pin fan headers? For auto adjusting the fan speed on cpu proportional to temperature?

[Ribbit]

I thought (assumed) that was done by varying the power voltage?

[Fluff]

Just been reading the server mainboards review off

www.tomshardware.com .

And the 4 pin headers seem like a cool thing to have. To control inlet / exhaust fan and cpu cooler, automatically.

As especially if it can be tied in with amd's cool n quiet.

[Jammrock]

Whether you like it or not, the nVidia nForce boards are considered the best chipset for AMD mobo's. The new ATi chipset has been getting a lot of praise lately, but the nForce4 is generally considered better.

The problem with that is, of course, the nForce4 is brand spanking new, which means hard to come by (only Asus and MSI will boards out this year) and you'll need to drop the extra cash on PCIe video card(s).

My current favorite mobo maker for "overall component choice and quality" is Giga Byte. They use some really good parts on their mobos, like real TI IEEE 1394b chips and the like. Their nForce3 boards are also very very nice. The nForce3 Ultra chipset still has a dedicated CSA-style bus for Gb ethernet, as to not take bus speed away from PCI, and sports standard AGP/PCI for lower cost add-ons.

My $0.02.

Jammrock

[leech]

Originally posted by rylan
Oh, remember to get some good low latency memory for your Athlon. They perform better with lower latency versus cranking the bus speed up.

I was going to order some Corsair XMS RAM. http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproduc...145-450&DEPA=1

Leech

[leech]

Originally posted by Jammrock
Whether you like it or not, the nVidia nForce boards are considered the best chipset for AMD mobo's. The new ATi chipset has been getting a lot of praise lately, but the nForce4 is generally considered better.

The problem with that is, of course, the nForce4 is brand spanking new, which means hard to come by (only Asus and MSI will boards out this year) and you'll need to drop the extra cash on PCIe video card(s).

My current favorite mobo maker for "overall component choice and quality" is Giga Byte. They use some really good parts on their mobos, like real TI IEEE 1394b chips and the like. Their nForce3 boards are also very very nice. The nForce3 Ultra chipset still has a dedicated CSA-style bus for Gb ethernet, as to not take bus speed away from PCI, and sports standard AGP/PCI for lower cost add-ons.

My $0.02.

Jammrock

That's what I really wanted, was an nforce board. But Asus only had the A8V motherboard. Generally I stick with Asus, I'll check out Gigabyte.

Leech

[Mehen]

Yeah, Corsair is real good stuff, and the stuff you picked out would probably be good; that one is 2-3-3-6 $212.25 -
the 2-2-2-5 stuff is $247.25 but you arent gonna see any big performance difference.
That ASUS A8V Deluxe is a real good board too.

[Taz]

For a board have a look at the MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum and for memory Crucial's Ballastix is hard to beat

http://msicomputer.co.uk/products.aspx?product_id=703505&cat_id=77

http://www.crucial.com/uk/ballistix/store/listmodule.asp

[Kurt]

Crucial is generally more compatible with A64 boards in various RAM configs, giving better performance (mainly when running 2 or more DIMMs).