Decisions, decisions...

[Denithor]

I have done some serious reading tonight and narrowed down my choice to one of two motherboards: the Gigabyte GA-K8NS Ultra or the MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum, both of which have instant rebates right now at the Egg.

Does anyone have experience with either of these boards or suggestions on which is better for (very) mild overclocking & gaming? Are there known problems with either board?

Thanks!
Matt

 

[globalcitizen]

Make sure you are pairing up with the right socket. I.E. make sure you have a s939 proc for those boards. I would recommend MSI.

 

[Denithor]

Yep, no problem there, just got a 939 3000+ for $100 and looking for a decent place to stick it. I would go the nForce4 route but I have a 9800 Pro I need to milk for a while longer. I figure I can always replace that with a 6800GT AGP in a year or so and when the polish wears off that setup I will replace the whole thing. The only bummer about NF3 versus NF4 is the NCQ support (or rather, lack thereof), as I have a nice Seagate 7200.8 drive purring away in my box.

Why the MSI versus the Gigabyte? Anything in particular?

 

[The Pentium Guy]

NCQ doesn't help that much - it can, in fact, DECREASE performance in some cases.
All the problems for the nForce3 are already ironed out, I'd go with the MSI: Best Overclocker + Most Features

I figure I can always replace that with a 6800GT AGP in a year or so.

IMHO that's a bad idea. Your 9800Pro (I have one) should last a while, you'll just have to decrease your resolution or something. Right now I can play HL2 on 100% max settings@1024x768, which is really not bad.

Unless you really ARE a hardcore gamer, I recommend keeping that card for about 2 years - it should be good to go.
I dunno, I guess I'm biased a bit . I'm goin to collage in 2 years, and I'm going to save money on a kickass system for collage.

-TPG

 

[imported_Kensai]

MSI.

 

[Rike]

Originally posted by: mptimmons
The only bummer about NF3 versus NF4 is the NCQ support (or rather, lack thereof), as I have a nice Seagate 7200.8 drive purring away in my box.

Why the MSI versus the Gigabyte? Anything in particular?

NCQ shows real benefits in a hard-drive intense environment like heavy multitasking with video editing and encoding or a server environment when many users making simultaneous requests against one drive. Desktop users don't typically see any benefit from NCQ. Therefore, NCQ support really should not be a factor in your mobo choice unless it will be used in a situation similar to the ones listed above.

MSI Nforce3 is a good way to if you plan to keep your current vid card for a while. Just to confirm what others have said, it generally considered to be the best OCing 939 AGP platform. The only down sides are (1) vid card upgrades will be more difficult going forward due to PCIe being the form factor of first choice for new cards and (2) dual core compatibility for the new A64 X2 is unknown for this board. If you don't care about those things (which is fine ) I think you have a clear choice for MSI.

 

[will889]

NF3/NF3 ultra S939 would actually be a nice way to go because they are slighly more stable than NF4, and you have only a R9800P, ou can still go AGP again with very significant upgrade with 6800U-GT-Ultra, or ATI X800XL-XT-XT PE. Thing is by the time you are ready to get a better GPU the new ones (R520 etc..) may already be out, thus giving you an X800XT AGP on the cheap possibly.

 

[Denithor]

That was pretty much my thought as well, stick with an "average" system for now (on the cheap) and upgrade the video card in a year or so to a 6800GT/U/whatever. Then in about two years or so upgrade the whole thing. Right now I am using a Celeron D 325 (sold my Northwood 2.4 recently which served me well for ~1.5 years) and have updated several other components in expectation of moving to an A64 system (Seagate 7200.8 250Gb, 1 Gb Corsair 3200 XMS).

At this point I am just a little unsure what motherboard to use for this system, I want something solid with decent OC capabilities (nothing too extreme, I plan to use stock cooling on the cpu). I was impressed by the Epox 9NDA3J/3+ but worried about the whole SATA/AGP issue (my 9800Pro has a VGA silencer on it, don't think I would be able to use the "locked" SATA ports). This really only leaves the Gigabyte and MSI boards in the nForce3U chipset.

Too bad there isn't a good mATX NF3Ultra mobo available out there for skt939!!!

 

[will889]

I hear ya. the new S939 full ATX boards seem to be to not be as refined as they could be. I see no point in going NF4/PCIe at all for myself for now. Im perfectly happy with my NF3 250BG/3400+. Not as much heat, noise, or issues. Yeah, i dunno why nVIDA didn't go with S939 mATX with a nice DX9 IGP for backup. Can you imagine how well a board like that would sell? EG: mATX/IGP 5700-5600Ultra, and a DECENT onboard sound codec like CMI9880 or Live! 24 bit? 200 stars at newegg within 6 months.