Best mobo Choice for a AMD 64 3000+?

[Special1Sauce]

I was concidering the nForce 3 is this a good mobo for 64s?

 

[McArra]

It is specially if you overclock. I have ordered a Cahaintech NF150 Zenith for me, which is to arrive this week

 

[AyashiKaibutsu]

I ordered a chaintech too. Ah, so much cool stuff comes with it.

 

[Vette73]

I am not a big fan of the nForce3 as it has a weak HT, one way is only 8 bit so runs at half speed.
Also NO athlon64 chipset supports PCI lock as of right now.

So with that said the board I went with is the Albatron K8X800 ProII

The Board

It has TRUE sata, hardware sound, and all the other standard goodies for only $119 shipped

 

[McArra]

Originally posted by: Marlin1975
I am not a big fan of the nForce3 as it has a weak HT, one way is only 8 bit so runs at half speed.
Also NO athlon64 chipset supports PCI lock as of right now.

So with that said the board I went with is the Albatron K8X800 ProII

The Board

It has TRUE sata, hardware sound, and all the other standard goodies for only $119 shipped

Chaintech has Envy 24bits sound as Albatron has, but the one in chaintech has full conectors, + it has AGP lock, Multimedia card reader and a lot of other great stuff. And the performance difference is so small it can't even be noticed. And I believe Nvidia drivers are much better and will improve performance a lot in new releases.

 

[Vette73]

Originally posted by: McArra

Originally posted by: Marlin1975
I am not a big fan of the nForce3 as it has a weak HT, one way is only 8 bit so runs at half speed.
Also NO athlon64 chipset supports PCI lock as of right now.

So with that said the board I went with is the Albatron K8X800 ProII

The Board

It has TRUE sata, hardware sound, and all the other standard goodies for only $119 shipped

Chaintech has Envy 24bits sound as Albatron has, but the one in chaintech has full conectors, + it has AGP lock, Multimedia card reader and a lot of other great stuff. And the performance difference is so small it can't even be noticed. And I believe Nvidia drivers are much better and will improve performance a lot in new releases.

Ahhh, no it does not. The Chaintech one has 5 regular sound ports and 1 optical port. The one on the Albatron K8X800 ProII has all 5-6-8 regular sound ports (depending on how you use it and look at it), 2 optical ports(1 in and 1 out), and 2 digital RCA ports (again 1 in 1 out).
Also the Chaintech is $50 more and really does not offer that much when it doe snot have a TRUE SATA ports and with the wearker HT running a couple hard drives on the PCI bus has more affect.

But compared to other nForce3 boards out there the Chaintech is probable the best out of them.

 

[XRdirtHead]

I didn't have much luck with the Asus..YMMV

 

[Shimmishim]

What's wrong with you guys?

Have you heard of the Shuttle An50R?

What a great board!!!

No pci lock but it does have agp lock...

Currently running 10 x 250 right now on this board 1:1

good stuff i tell ya...

Sound is off of the AL650 Realtek chip.... good stuff...

has Lan and gigalan (dual lan)

 

[LouPoir]

I agree - the Shuttle board looks sweet - I dread the day I feel compelled to buy a Chaintech board -

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Originally posted by: Shimmishim
What's wrong with you guys?

Have you heard of the Shuttle An50R?

What a great board!!!

No pci lock but it does have agp lock...

Currently running 10 x 250 right now on this board 1:1

good stuff i tell ya...

Sound is off of the AL650 Realtek chip.... good stuff...

has Lan and gigalan (dual lan)

Mine will be here thursday My 8KUSA won't play nice with the Raptor I just got so AN50R here I come! I'm hoping to break the 233fsb limit I've hit on my current setup but with a working Raptor I'll still be happy me thinks because I hate not having my AMD 8151 chipset anymore!

 

[Peter]

Well the NForce3 boards sure are easier overclocks, simply because they're having a 25 percent lower HyperTransport clock to begin with ...

 

[McArra]

Originally posted by: Peter
Well the NForce3 boards sure are easier overclocks, simply because they're having a 25 percent lower HyperTransport clock to begin with ...

And AGP lock. But the performance difference is none, and sometimes even performs better. It's all about tastes, I trust Nvidia will improve performance with new driver releases more than Via will.

 

[McArra]

Originally posted by: LouPoir
I agree - the Shuttle board looks sweet - I dread the day I feel compelled to buy a Chaintech board -

Are you having problems? Mine arrives tomorrow and I'll post how it does.

 

[Peter]

Originally posted by: McArraBut the performance difference is none, and sometimes even performs better. It's all about tastes, I trust Nvidia will improve performance with new driver releases more than Via will.

Excuse me? There is a quite massive performance hit on NForce3 as soon as AGP really gets exercised - in high end gaming and professional 3D rendering, we're talking up to 20 percent here.
There's nothing they could do about that with driver updates either. It's the chip hardware itself that can't do the full frequency AND has only a half-width interface in one direction.

 

[McArra]

Originally posted by: Peter

Originally posted by: McArraBut the performance difference is none, and sometimes even performs better. It's all about tastes, I trust Nvidia will improve performance with new driver releases more than Via will.

Excuse me? There is a quite massive performance hit on NForce3 as soon as AGP really gets exercised - in high end gaming and professional 3D rendering, we're talking up to 20 percent here.
There's nothing they could do about that with driver updates either. It's the chip hardware itself that can't do the full frequency AND has only a half-width interface in one direction.

Could you show me some Benchmarks please. I know that it lacks in profesional opengl 3d, but I haven't seen any performance drop in 3d games.

 

[McArra]

Anand review , and it seems they're neck to neck. Chaintech is the best in most of the tests but of course the difference is so small you won't notice it. Again, It's all about tastes

 

[Peter]

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mainboards/display/s754-roundup_36.html

for example. You see the HT bottleneck happen in the latest games too. But also, you see how the NVidia chipset is currently performing better on IDE, which gives it the edge in business benchmarks.

The SiS 755 chipset actually has the best of both worlds - full speed HyperTransport and lightning fast IDE controllers.

 

[McArra]

In Anand review Nforce3 is only 4fps behind in X2. Not noticeable.

 

[Peter]

Depends on the settings. The more detail, the more AGP transfers happen, the worse it gets. YMMV.

 

[McArra]

Originally posted by: Peter
Depends on the settings. The more detail, the more AGP transfers happen, the worse it gets. YMMV.

I have been thinking on that... why doesn't it happen in 3dMark03 which is much more intensive, or in Comanche 4 (very CPU dependent), or in Halo? Could it be driver related problem?

 

[Peter]

You gave your answer right there. These are much more CPU/GPU throughput bound than AGP bottlenecked.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I've built and used many SiS based boards and they've always been good for me, and I'd love to try the 755 but none of the vendors I do business with have the A2 in stock. BTW Peter, the AN50R says in the specs that it supports up to 1600mhz HT, so what's the caveat with that? TIA for any info.

 

[Peter]

The caveat is that NVidia _know_ that "1600 MHz" (200 actually) HT isn't working with the NF3-150. That's why they had to step down by 25 percent. And one of the directional links is only 8-bit, while all other chipsets run at full frequency and full 16-bit width in both directions.

SiS 755 boards from more vendors are on their way. For now it's just the ECS 755A, with its inability to run DDR400 RAM interesting for upgraders, but not quite so for new builds ... although its price of less than 80 euros is tempting.

 

[LokiX]

Ok. i know no one has posted in this thread for a while but this is the Processor i am wanting to get. I will not be overclocking. You guys speak a lot about oc'ability when you speak of what boards are the better choice. With oc'ing aside what would the best performing board be? AND, for future upgradeability with the cpu?

I was looking at the Abit KV8-MAX3

 

[Vette73]

^


Thats a good one.

Also look at the Alb board