Best S754 mobo with PCIe?

[BobDaMenkey]

I've pretty much narrowed down my system instability to my el cheapo ECS motherboard. And my recent issues with Leadtek and their inability to send me a working video card have put me in the position to want to upgrade.

However I don't have the spare scratch sitting around to do a full new system like I would like to. I do however want an x1900XT, and a motherboard that'll play happy with it. Yes, I know my system will be bottlenecked. But I don't care. If the board has onboard video even better, because when I finally do build a new proper gaming rig, I can just pull the 1900 out and leave the machine crunching for my distributed computing projects.

So in all, newegg has 21 choices for me. However I refuse to get a Foxconn or an ECS motherboard.

I'm particularly eyeing this ASRock board, I've built a few PCs with ASRock boards before for friends/family, and I've never had an issue with them.

Biostar also has a motherboard on the same north/south bridges, with many more reviews.

Would either of these be good picks, or is there something better?

 

[Zap]

Zap's mini-review of Biostar Tforce6100

If you want to overclock, the Tforce should be at the top of your list. The Epox 6100 chipset board might be good at overclocking also, but I'm not positive. Their socket 939 and AM2 versions of the same board are supposedly good overclockers, but haven't heard anything about the socket 754 version. For the Biostar, I did have one board bought as "open box" which did not overclock too well - hit a wall at 280MHz HTT, but my other one was still POSTing at 335MHz HTT. I also have bought one of the Biostar Geforce6100 boards - not the "T" version. They go for over $10 less. The main functional differences I found was that it was not as overclockable and it does not have Smart Fan.

If you are not overclocking, then any board should work fine for you as long as it works as advertised and has all the features you are looking for.

 

[BobDaMenkey]

Thanks for the info Zap

 

[pcgeek11]

I have a TForce 6100 MB and I love it... No problems at all and a feature rich BIOS, It also has a PCIe slot fo an add in card.

pcgeek11

 

[FreedomGUNDAM]

DFI Infinity NF4X