Best motherboard for Athlon XP CPU?

[NickSD]

Hey everyone,

I've been thinking about buying a new computer for quite some time now, and I think I'm finally ready to buy one. I've decided that I'll most likely get the Athlon XP 1800+ CPU but I'm having trouble deciding which motherboard to buy. I've read the reviews of the boards on Anandtech but I'm still confused as to which is the best for me. I plan on purchasing a few 256MB DDR chips from Crucial (minimum 3) to use in it. Ideally, I'd want a motherboard with Firewire and USB built-in, but I'm not so sure that one exists at this point. I might even want to use a SCSI hard drive alongside an Ultra DMA drive that I already have. I'd like to get a machine that will be good for video editing and encoding, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on SCSI vs. Ultra DMA and if Ultra DMA is sufficient. I'm not very interested in overclocking so that is not really a concern of mine, unless it is something that is so ridiculously easy that I might as well do it anyways. If anyone has any recommendations for a motherboard, please respond to this post. I'd also be curious to know which CPU fan and Case/Power Supply I should get for a system like this -- I've heard that there are special requirements and it would be nice to know some specific part #s and places to buy this stuff online.

Thanks a lot!

Nick

 

[XCrodo]

On the top of my head, I don't think there are any socket a boards with firewire. So far the MSI K7T266 Pro2 , the Epox 8kha+ & Soyo K7V Dragon+ are getting the best reviews. These seem to be pretty solid board all around. The Epox stands out as the most overclocker friendly I think, while the Soyo has a lot of onboard features(Raid, LAN, Audio 5.1). The MSI K7T266 Pro2 is the only one that has USB 2.0 support if that's anything to you. Also worth mentionning are the Abit KR7A and Asus A7V266-E which should come out pretty soon. If you're big on RAM, you might want to take a look at the Shuttle AK31 rev. 3 which is the ONLY kt266a board with 4 DDR slot. I'm personally waiting for the Asus since it has all the same features of the K7V Dragon, but is much easier to find where I live. In the end it comes out to finding what features you want.

As for SCSI, I cant really help you since I've always used IDE drives. For your power supply, just make sure you buy a good one, "AMD Certified" being a good thing here, and of course 300W.

Good luck!

 

[AkumaBao]

I would wait just two more week for Iwill's XP333. Check the info here.