What motherboard manufacturers do you suggest?
What motherboard manufacturers do you suggest?
I have two systems based from Shuttle's motherboards, and a system based from Gigabyte. At work, we used to use alot of MSI's stuff. What do you guys use?
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A little in details
I would get the MSI K8T Master2 FAR if you are looking to build your own system. It can either run one Athlon 64 FX/Opteron or two Opterons. It has 4 RAM slots like normal motherboards. It has an AGP 8X slot and 4 PCI slots directly below that. If you want a Video card that takes up 2 slots, like the nVidia XFX GeForce FX 5950 Ultra (256MB DDR), you still have 3 PCI slots left in which you could put a sound card, a TV/FM tuner card, and anything else you liked.
This motherboard can be found at Newegg for only $205.00. If you want to add in 2 Opterons I would suggest these.
This motherboard can be found at Newegg for only $205.00. If you want to add in 2 Opterons I would suggest these.
Athlon XP 3200 3DMark05 Score: 3460
GeForce 6600 GT 3DMark05 Score: 3132
14304 SETI Results:
Athlon 64 2800
Athlon XP 3200
Athlon XP 2100
Athlon XP 1800
Pentium 3 Celeron 667MHz
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I'm addicted to Asus motherboards
First and foremost is their ability to flash the BIOS from a Windows application. For some people this can be nerve racking and extremely frustrating. The program is called ASUS-Update, and it has saved me lots of headaches and worrying whether or not I flashed my BIOS correctly.. and the frustration of having to send my mobo back to the manufacturer to get a new BIOS chip installed.
I guess versatility would be another reason. You can overclock your cpu speed, Ram timing/cycles and FSB without having to unlock anything. It's all done in the bios.
And last but not least would be reliabily. I have been using Asus for about 7 years and have yet to encounter any problems.
Asus offers a great value in any cpu configuration you can come up with.
First and foremost is their ability to flash the BIOS from a Windows application. For some people this can be nerve racking and extremely frustrating. The program is called ASUS-Update, and it has saved me lots of headaches and worrying whether or not I flashed my BIOS correctly.. and the frustration of having to send my mobo back to the manufacturer to get a new BIOS chip installed.
I guess versatility would be another reason. You can overclock your cpu speed, Ram timing/cycles and FSB without having to unlock anything. It's all done in the bios.
And last but not least would be reliabily. I have been using Asus for about 7 years and have yet to encounter any problems.
Asus offers a great value in any cpu configuration you can come up with.
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Neo, you mentioned ECS motherboards in your list of makers.
I had a computer that was given to me, and it had a K7S5A-Pro in it.
I had nothing but problems with it from the day my buddy dropped it off to me. He had a 1.3g AMD in it (I think it was a T-Bird), but it would only let me boot if it was set at 1.1g. I did get ahold of ECS customer support, but they weren't much help with the matter. They kept blaming AMD
In defense of that motherboard.. it is only $42, but it should still do what it says it will do.
I had a computer that was given to me, and it had a K7S5A-Pro in it.
I had nothing but problems with it from the day my buddy dropped it off to me. He had a 1.3g AMD in it (I think it was a T-Bird), but it would only let me boot if it was set at 1.1g. I did get ahold of ECS customer support, but they weren't much help with the matter. They kept blaming AMD

In defense of that motherboard.. it is only $42, but it should still do what it says it will do.
I'm pretty sure that some Gigabyte boards can do something similiar, but I'm not certain because I have never really looked into it.Sumpin_Wong wrote:I'm addicted to Asus motherboards
First and foremost is their ability to flash the BIOS from a Windows application. For some people this can be nerve racking and extremely frustrating. The program is called ASUS-Update, and it has saved me lots of headaches and worrying whether or not I flashed my BIOS correctly.. and the frustration of having to send my mobo back to the manufacturer to get a new BIOS chip installed.
I guess versatility would be another reason. You can overclock your cpu speed, Ram timing/cycles and FSB without having to unlock anything. It's all done in the bios.
And last but not least would be reliabily. I have been using Asus for about 7 years and have yet to encounter any problems.
Asus offers a great value in any cpu configuration you can come up with.