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best cheap mobo for A64 3000+ ?

G

GratefullySaved

Senior member
Hi gang,

Thanks to some Christmas goodness it looks like I'll be upgrading from an XP2100+ with 1GB PC2700 RAM up to a new Athlon64 3000+. I'll have to use my same PC2700 RAM on the new mobo, but I'm happy with that as I can't afford new RAM.

My question is simply what is the best but least expensive mobo that supports the 754 socket and can use my PC2700 RAM. I'd also love to have onboard sound and firewire ideally.

Any and all suggestions are appreciated, as my time to research all this is really limited.

I've built four PC's prior to this Athlon64 system, and have been up to speed on things prior to now, but it's been a full year and a half since my last upgrade and I'm a little rusty on the latest, greatest, and best combo deals to pursue.

Just to paint the complete picture, I essentially have $125 given to me, and a small budget of my own money to add to that in order to make this purchase work. I need to keep the TOTAL purchase price of CPU and mobo as FAR under $300 as possible. The Athlon 64 3000+ retail version (with HSF) is $150 from newegg right now. If anyone knows of better pricing please let me know.

Thanks sincerely to all who take the time to help,

GS

P.S. - My main use of the new computer will be for Photoshop 7 and possibly Painter 9, gaming, and good ol web surfing (which obviously means nothing in this scenario). Bottom line is it's a secondary image editing workstation that is also used for fun n gaming.
 
Epox makes an nforce3 board ($64.50 at newegg) that should also work well. It may require a bios flash to the newest version. Early versions had some problems, which were fixed by bios updates.
 
The cheapest of them all, and a fairly solid choice even if you don't consider the cost, is the ECS 755-A2. The board auto-detects the maximum speed of your RAM and chooses the correct divider (down from CPU core, remember!). Also, should your RAM's SPD EEPROM misrepresent the DIMM's capabilities, there is also a manual RAM MHz limiter setting in its BIOS. Use from PC3200 all the way down to PC1600. Firewire isn't on it ... just plug a PCI card, they're lots cheaper than the premium paid for boards that have it on.
 
chaintech VNF3-250 is'nt so cheap anymore. I got it when It was $61 now it's in the mid 70's.... Now the EPOX "EP-8KDA3I" with NVIDIA nForce3 250 Chipset puts them all to shame@$64...
 
whoops, the 755-A2 is expensive at newegg ... over here in Europe, it's 53 euros, and the only other board coming close in price is the ASRock board using the ULi 1689 chipset. Everything else is at least 20 more.
 
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