Athlon 64 motherboard question

[fish99]

Hi there,

Having finally cottonned on to how slow and expensive intel chips are I'm going to pick up an Athlon 64 3200+ Socket 754 in 2 weeks. I've been with intel chips for so long that I don't know much about athlon 64 boards and chipsets.

What I'm looking for in a board is performance and value, rather than useless (to me) extra features, but as I say it's got to perform well for gaming. I won't be overclocking the chip at all.

I'm a fan of Gigabyte boards and came across the K8N-S for £59 (uk) which is pretty cheap for a motherboard. It's NForce3 250. It does SATA-150 and DDR 400 which are my main requirements, so to me this board looks ideal.

So what I want to know is - is there anything wrong with these boards, does it support the full range of socket 754 athlon 64s (ie up to 3700+) since it doesn't say on the Gigabyte website, and will it perform well?

Cheers,
Simon.

 

[fish99]

Okeydokey, 110 views and no replies so I'm probably asking the wrong questions

What I really want to know is - is NForce3 250 quick, and is there anything important missing off this board - it is a budget board afterall but as far as I can tell it has everything to make it perform well, just it's short of extras, which I'm not interested in anyway

Thanks in advance.

http://www.giga-byte.com/Motherboard/Products/Products_GA-K8NS.htm

 

[PowderBB3D]

It is a socket 754 board and as such supports CPUs with 754 pins, if that answers your question.

It's a solid board, stable and reliable. I believe that there is a sort of artificial limiter on the overclock functionality of the board, however, which prevents booting when you mess with the FSB; that can be circumvented somehow (anyone want to help me out here).

Nothing important missing - I believe it even includes some nice things like Gigabit LAN and Firewire (yay for Firewire, although that's more standard now than not). Gigabyte is a pretty feature-heavy manufacturer.

 

[fish99]

Cheers dude, that's pretty much what I wanted to know. I won't be overclocking so that's no problem.