Best AMD mATX board.

[farscape]

Looking to put together/upgrade my system into an AspireX QPack. Any opinions on good and small?

 

[L00PY]

Depends on your requirements. If you must have firewire, that narrows things down. Or if you have to be able to get a mad OC, that changes things too. There are a couple of lists floating out there on other boards listing mATX boards by feature and another by OC ability.

Me, I'm waiting on a board with DVI and the ability to do 1920x1200 over it. If I didn't have that second part, I'd go with a borad with ATI's revised chipset. As it stands, I'm waiting on ASUS to release their 6150/430 board.

 

[farscape]

My current Shuttle AN35N/2600 Mobile/9800pro is getting a bit long in the tooth. It handles everything "adequately", but the horsepower isn't there for gaming with candy on any more. 8x6 isn't as good looking as 16x12.

Firewire isn't a biggie. If I need it I can add in a card.

Shuttle used to have some nice stuff, but I don't think they're in the MB biz anymore.
Biostar has a few - but I never was crazy about them.
Wish there was a decent ULI based board - that way I could still use my 98 in the short term.

Guess I'll still keep on looking - I know they are out there.

EDIT:I know I'm not into Biostar, but in the short term - how does the nvidia 6100 on-board compare with a 9800pro?

 

[L00PY]

6100 does not compare well with a "real" video card like the 9800 pro.

It's clocked at 425 MHz, has 2 pixel pipelines and 1 vertex pipeline. No local memory either available on board like some ATI boards. For example there's a Jetway board with 32MB side memory that supposedly helps with the IGP performance.

If I had to buy a mATX mobo right now I'd probably get one of the MSI RS482M4 variants. Ideally the RS482M4-FD if I could find it, but I think I've only seen the RS482M4-ILD available stateside. I want that 6150/430 board, but if I can't get it, going all ATI is attractive. One thing that seems to be common to recent onboard IGPs is that if you buy the same brand of PCIe videocard, your IGP can still work as an additional monitor output.

 

[rei]

the 'best' c51g boards are:

asus a8n-vm csm
biostar tforce 6100-939
foxconn 6150k8ma-8ekrs

(foxconn is kind of ghetto mfr/bundle, the manuals etc are the worst out of major mfr, lacking polish and have typos etc.)

gigabyte ga-k8n51gmf-9
gigabyte ga-k8n51pvmt-9

everything but the last gigabyte and asus board are starting to become widely available.

 

[Spongo]

anyone else like to chime in?

 

[erwos]

Originally posted by: farscape
Firewire isn't a biggie. If I need it I can add in a card.

This is exactly the wrong kind of thinking for mATX boards. You're extremely slot-limited, not as bad as a Shuttle, but not terribly better, either. A gigabit LAN card and an IEEE-1394 card later, and you've only got one slot left for whatever SUPER AMAZING PERIPHERAL comes out later on.

The Asus A8N-VM CSM seems to be the best board. Best mix of features I've ever seen for a mATX board, especially if you want on-board video.

The video card issue is painfu on the walletl, but there's really no way around it. Grab a 6800GS (or a Connect3D GTO if you're a gambler). Either should be better, and the price isn't that bad.

-Erwos

 

[Spongo]

whats a good board w/o the onboard video?

 

[imported_hoodoo]

The Asus A8N-VM CSM seems to be the best board. Best mix of features I've ever seen for a mATX board, especially if you want on-board video.
-Erwos

thanks for this board suggestion... also has "Dual VGA output: DVI-D and RGB (DVI-D can not be converted to output RGB signal to CRT.)"
😀