A few questions about motherboards for athlon, and who I should buy from

[faceplate]

Hello everyone. I know people here are busy. I appreciate the help everyone provides, but I need to ask some questions that have been asked many times, and some that have not. I had a K7S5A. I liked it alot. I was using a 1.1 Athlon T-bird on it. My motherboard kicked the bucket one night, all on it's own. I wanted to RMA, but ECS does not take RMA's if you are not a vendor. I tried to find out who I bought it from. The online vendor I bought it from went out of buisness. I need a new mobo now. I am thinking I might as well buy a new generation of motherboard, instead of spending $50 on the old one. I will be doing some research and looking at posts on this board. I would just like a few names of some mobos you have had some experiences with, and whether you reccommend them or not. I have only purchased 2 mobos in my life but I learned one thing. There are a lot of things reviews dont tell you. MSI PRO2-a had the 686B south bridge problem and data curruption with Sound Blaster Live. ECS K7S5A had data curruption on the floppy disk controller in win2k until the bios update. My k7s5a could not go into standby mode. I dont know what was up with that. So that is why I want the real story, all the problems that people just ignore. Should I go for the KT333 chipset. Is that platform mature enough? Or should I go for something older. I want to be able to use brand new athlons and also my current chip. I also would like to know who is a good cheap online vendor. I need someone I can RMA stuff back to. The only 2 motherboards I have ever bought went bad eventually, and I could not RMA either one. I need someone who will stay in buisness. Well thats it. Thanks for your help.

Peace!

 

[CaptnKirk]

From experience, I personnaly only buy from NewEgg, and the only Motherboard I have come to trust is ABIT. Some companies may have a 'Cheaper' sales item, but as you have learned - sou are the 'STUCK-EE', I have never had a component that did not work perfectly on an ABIT board, but there may be some that don't, I've just never seen one. The BIOS can be a bit overwhelming for a first user, the depth of the setting capabilities are collosal. It will take you some time to learn and feel confortable when you start tweaking.

 

[Boonesmi]

newegg.com and mwave.com are both very good online stores

i really like epox and asus boards

personally if i was buying today i would get the epox 8k5a2 (or if i wanted raid and onboard lan i would get the 8k5a2+)
if your going to wait a while before buying the new kt400 based boards will be out soon

 

[MrBumpy]

The Iwill XP-333 is a tried-and-true board that I have used for a while now without any issues. I can't say the same for my Fianceé's ECS K7S5A (DON'T use a PCI graphics card in this board!). The Iwill board is based on the C revision of the ALi MAGiK 1 chipset, which doesn't have any compatibility issues that I can think of. Some people criticise it because it benches slightly lower than the VIA chipset in memory benchmarks, but I'll take stability and compatibility over a little extra speed any day. Not to mention that I have had my share of VIA problems, and do not intend to purchase a board based on a VIA chipset EVER again.

 

[o1die]

If you're very experienced and feel lucky, you might want to consider a refurbished board from newegg. My asus p4s533 has run pretty well for about 2 weeks. The board was bare bones, with no manual, driver cd, or even the mounting plate for the p4 heatsink. I took the mounting plate off my backup via board, flashed the bios, and have a very good board for less than 2/3 the price of new.

 

[faceplate]

Hello again. Thanks people for the advice. I read anandtech's KT333 mobo roundup. Nothing among those mobo's impresses me. I dont know if I will gain any performance over my previous setup. I think I will buy a refurbished K7S5A from NewEgg. This way I wont have to reinstall windows or reformat. It will only cost $35 bucks. I am considering waiting for the KT400 chipset. I dont know when it will come out, could anyone tell me? I am thinking by then I could get a new CPU and hard drive as well. Then I will see a good performance gain. It all depends on when the KT400 comes out. I hope the KT400 platform is stable and the mobo are better then the KT333. Don't get me wrong they seem good, but I cant find one that I like alot. Do you think there will be a second generation of KT333 boards? What do you think of my plan about waiting. Thanks, Peace!

 

[faceplate]

bump

 

[Tiger]

I'll second the Epox vote. I've never had one fail or refuse to work with any card or peripheral.

 

[LostHiWay]

Newegg and Epox boards for me