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Best Motherboard for a 2500+ w/strong o/c

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DKlein

Senior member
I'm currently in the process of reinventing my computer. I wanted to start overclocking my chip a bit farther than it has already gone, but hit a wall, so got a new chip and the mobo won't take it. So it's either waste the $100 I spent on this nice, brand-new 2500+ Barton, or buy a new motherboard. The decision seemed clear to me, and what the hell, I'll get a new graphics card too. I'm selling the old motherboard/RAM/CPU/vid card to my sister for $250, and I've got about a hundred more in saved up tips - all this for a new mobo and vid card. I'm thinking I might go with a 9500 or 9600 pro for the vid card, which should take me down to about $150-200 for the motherboard. I want to overclock this thing hard too, so what's everyone's recommendation?

Stuff I'll be working with:

AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton)
Radeon 9500 pro (probably)
Kingston VRAM DDR333 512MB (just hoping this stuff will work well)
Maxtor 7200RPM 80BG
Nice cooling system

The A7V333 I had was not too good, and is currently being repaired a second time (aftermath of putting the Barton in it) so I'm not sure I want to go with ASUS again. I want to be able to overclock from the BIOS, and am looking for something reliable.
 
Originally posted by: Vegetto
abit nf7-s ultra 400 🙂
Click to expand...

I would say the same thing... Nforce2 boards are the best for OC'ing AMD procs... and the ABIT seems to be the front runner out of them all!🙂
 
i'm also looking for a good nforce2 board. it doesn't have to be the best OCer, but at least be able to moderately OC. i've heard good things about Abit's NF7-S Ultra 400, but i'm also thinking about the Gigabyte 7N400 Pro. does anyone know any good or bad things about that board?
 
If you are looking for a no frills nforce2 board, look into the Shuttle AN35N Ultra 400. I picked 1 up for $68 and it has been running this 2500+ @ 3200+ default vcore absolutely fine! This is on my daughters computer. Memory benches with SiSoft MAX3 are right up there with the example systems. It doesn't have the mcp-t southbridge, but nothing a $25 Live! oem card can't fix (had 1 here from her old system so it cost me nothing). Had no problems setting up the board and its been running rock solid.

 
If its overclocking you have in mind, then stay away from VIA chipsets.

Mobo recomendation list, in order:

1.- DFI Lan Party NFII
2.- ASUS A7N8X/X/Deluxe
3.- ABIT NF7/S/M
4.- Gigabyte 7NNXP/7N400P
 
Thanks for all the suggestions. Unfortunately I just lost my 2000+ taking it out of the other computer I had it running on (forgot to ground myself and accidentally bent one of the pins - it is fried and broken - just has not been my week/month for computing), so my budget is now significantly lower (about $250 lower, so no new graphics card I guess). The Abit seems to be popular, and I do want frills so the Shuttle would be out, and like I said I'm not too interested in another ASUS. I think I'll look into the Abit and DFI a bit further...

BTW anyone want a nice ASUS A7V333? Never malfunctioned or been damaged.... I swear! 😀
 
ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe is the best dang mobo I have ever put together for a customer. Using the advice of the Anandtech reviewers and members here, I design them with paired memory, and if you put in SATA Hdds in raid, with at least a barton, you will have a state of the art match to highlight that ATI 9500. Your 7200 rpm 80mgig will do very nice as well. My last build was an XP2800+ and PC2700 DDR at 256 ea for 512 running xp home ed. and a 9000 with tV tuner. The set up runs 2% cpu usage with TV tuner on and four windows opened on the desktop for stock trading.

A7N8X is the best mobo I have ever seen, and it will do nicely if you want to overclock with it too. I am not fond of overclocking for a pitance of perfomance boost at risk of shortening life of the CPU or risking corupting data. Just my opinion. I think overclocking is overrated, since yoygert such fine performance with a good matched engineered setup as you can do with this mobo and ram/processor combination.
 
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