MotherBoards, choices??

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old.Nitefoll

Guest
I'm upgrading my system and am looking for the skinny on some of the motherboards out there.

I have a GigaByte board at the moment, but it's socket 7, need socket type A for the new AMD's

I'll be plugging the following into the board and don't wanna buy a board thats gonna cause bottlenecks or some such shit.


- AMD K7 1000Mhz (266FSB) CPU THUNDERBIRD
- ChainTek 64Mb GeForce 2 Ultra
- 256MB DDR (PC2100) MEMORY or 256MB RDRAM (PC800) MEMORY
- 30GB 7,200rpm IDE HARD DRIVE
- SonicVortex 2 Sound Card
- 10/100Mb Network Card

Any opinions or comments welcome, makes, models, whatever!!


Cheers

:: Nitefoll ::
-
 
H

haggisman

Guest
try to find a board with a SiS735 chipset, either that or the nvidia nforce chipset, both will have a radicaly bigger bandwidth in the motherboard.
 
S

stu

Guest
Durz has an I-Will KK266Plus-R, and it seems pretty good.

The new Abit KG-7 RAID looks pretty impressive as well.

Personally I'd wait a month or so and get a Northwood though :D
 
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old.Jimbo Mahoney

Guest
Get the Epox 8K7A (+ version has RAID).

It is one of the best Socket A's out there.

Massive Overclocking ability and superb performance.

Yes, it's the motherboard I am using :D

Got my 1333 Athlon upto 1600 with it (9.5 x 168).

Nice.

12227 3DMarks (2000) with it too (geforce 2 ultra).

About £135 ish I think.

Plug one stick of 256 MB crucial PC2100 from www.crucial.com/uk and u r laughing :)

Hope that helps,

Jimbo
 
S

stu

Guest
Out of interest, why would you only go for 256mb of ram when it's so cheap at the moment?
 
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old.Jimbo Mahoney

Guest
256 MB is the optimium amount of RAM for a system running games under Windows 9x / Me.

Win 2k / XP like more, say 512 MB, but for the 9x / Me OSs, above 256 can actually decrease performance.

I'll find a link.

In addition, AFAIK, only 256 sticks of DDR are available. Having two sticks reduces system speed, as both slots have to be polled / read WHY so taking valuable CPU cycles to drag data out of them.

looking for a link......................

found it.

here ya go

http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/other/ram_performance/2.htm

Regards,

Jimbo
 
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old.Nitefoll

Guest
I only got 256Mb at the moment 'cause I don't have the cash for any more ;( (End of the month and all that..bills.bills.bills)

Jimbo is correct though, as bizarre as it may seem, too much ram actually decreases performance, I've made that mistake before.

Couldn't figure out why my old system was running like a bag of crap, spent a fortune on new hardware only to discover it was RAM that was the bottleneck.

How pissed off was I....VERY!! GRR


Hmm.. The Abit KG-7 RAID does looka bit tasty.


::NiteFoll::
 
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old.TUG

Guest
Well I'd wait a bit for more mobo's using the SiS735 chipset... the only current mobo out using it is one by ECS, and it's nuff fast, but no overclocking options. If you aint bothered about overclocking, get that as it's only like.............. 60 squid! Very nice really. www.tekheads.co.uk have 'em. But me being me, would wait for mobo's with more tweaking options... I wonder if Abit will bring one out soon.
 
Y

Yaka

Guest
go for the Kg-7 series m8 more stable than Durzels pysc evaluation lovly over clocking options:)
 
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old.Nitefoll

Guest
Been checking out Reviews and Hardware suppliers and the KG-7 is looking more and more tasty.

All I want is stability and reliability, not too bothered about overclocking. Had some baad overclocking exepriences, being without a PC for a month was quite a traumitic experience ;)

Cringe in fear as your prized possesion goes out in a puff of blue smoke ;(
 
B

bodhi

Guest
The Asus Black Pearl one looks yummeh. But it's for proper processors. So yeah, go with the Epox one. Know two people with them and it seems very nice and stable for a VIA board.
 
A

-AP-

Guest
This Ram business, I was having problems with my computer, it was running windowsME.... decided to install 98 on it and everything is fine. Everything apart from it takes AGES to load up at the start.... i mean ages. Would having too much RAM be a cause of that. Got 512MB PC2100 High Bandwidth DDR Memory not sure what that is really. Would taking some of that out do anything? Or would some nice person like to send me a copy of windows 2k??


DDR???
 
L

~Lazarus~

Guest
depends on how much shite its trying to start up.

goto Start --> run
and enter msconfig.

in here you can adjust what it does at startup.

I found it best to remove someof the auto starts like SYSTRAY

Windows 98 is notoriously slow for starting up.
 
W

Will

Guest
I got mine down to a very reasonable boot time - about 20 seconds - by tweaking the bios, and clearing out all that background crap. A defrag works wonders too:D
 
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-AP-

Guest
OK thanks ppl..... will run msconfig and clear up my start-up programs, will run a defrag over night. As for the bios tweaking.... a little too much for me :)


Btw, what should i LEAVE in my msconfig startups??
 
L

~Lazarus~

Guest
keep taking things out till it stops working right - then add the last one back in.

The changes you make are not permanent - you can readd them later.
 
W

Will

Guest
Bios Tuning - Tom's Hardware do an excellent guide. Be careful, but it teaches you a lot about your PC, and me and my flatmate had excellent results after optimising our bios. (What is the plural of bios anyway?)
 
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old.Nitefoll

Guest
If you have a network card in your machine, this can also cause problems.

My 98 and Me machines slowed right down when I installed network cards in them. (Avg. Boot Time = 1/2 Mins)

I had to strip out all the networking configuration in control panel and install it all from scratch before 98/Me would agree that - well, it wasn't part of some global network spanning the entire planet, but part of a small 5 machine home network ;) ;)

VERY frustrating!!

Try removing the "startup" stuff as discussed above, if this doesn't help, try disabling your network cards.
 
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