ComputerBB

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?

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.

Manufacturers I would Suggest:
ASUS
MSI
ECS
Shuttle
Gigabyte

Myself, I use a ECS 648-FX MOBO 5 PCI Slots 1 AGP slot intergrated Sound

Abit all the way

At least for Intel P4 go for the IS7.

What is your experience with Soyo Motherboards both for Intel & AMD platform?.

I havent ever used soyo

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.

Soo True.. Asus ownz

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 have had this motherboard since August of last year, and still havent had one problem with it... I find this model to have great preformance the day I got it... It just might be the motherboard you have

ASUS
MSI

Update.. I just dumped my ECS because the IDE port died..

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.

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.

ABIT has the same program.. It is called FlashMenu.. It is part of the new uguru technology from ABIT