Abit vs. Asus

[awwwyeah206]

I'm upgrading my cpu and motherboard... here are the lowest prices I found for mobo/cpu/heatsink/fan combos in my price range

Asus A7V333 w/ AMD Athlon XP 1.67Ghz for $173.78

or

Abit KD7 w/ AMD Athlon XP 1.73Ghz for $176.80

in order of importance.. here is what i'm looking for

1. compatibility
2. reliability
3. a good BIOS
4. performance

I am NOT looking to overclock

what would you suggest between the 2? or even a third recommendation?

 

[CraigRT]

I'd go with the A7V333 setup.
I have 2 at work and they run very nicely I think.

 

[touchmyichi]

I wouldn't take either of those setups, I'd go for a epox,asus, or the msi(the msi is pretty cheap) nforce 2 board. Then I'd get a T Bred 1700+ for 50 bucks, that should cost just as much and you would have a lot of room for future upgrades. If you get this setup u should try to oc it, really u could easily get this chip to 2100+ stable and u'd save quite a bit.

 

[awwwyeah206]

with an Epox motherboard in the same price range keeping with the same features I'd be downgrading the CPU speed to about 1.47Ghz... would that be worth it?

 

[newbiepcuser]

I've never had an Asus board gone bad on me, but a couple of my Abit boards died on me in few years. Between the two manufactures, I would have to say Asus.

I would definetly check out the nForce2 boards though.

 

[alm99]

I have gone with Abit in the past, but the last two motherboards I had with the Antec cases, the mb wouldn't lline up with the holes. I haven't had that problem with any other mb.

 

[corkyg]

All things being equal I would take Asus for better QA factors.

 

[BoomAM]

Ive owned both an Asus and an Abit Motherboard (A7V Original, KT7A-RAID) and have found them both to be very good motherboards.

 

[KF]

The deal of the year is the ASUS A7N266-VM. $72 shipped at Newegg. You give up a tiny bit of memory performance between that and something with 333MHz memory. Boost your CPU choice. For saving money and no OC, this is the optimum tradeoff. Fast memory beyond 266 DDR does very little for Athlons, except for OCing.

A7N266-VM has onboard sound, LAN, video.

Older motherboards, including your choices, generally have the bugs well squished. Just don't get the revisions that have been dumped to "surplus" resellers and have a super-low price tag if you want the bug-squished versions.