Good Athlon64 754pin mobo with bolt holes?

[Mavrick007]

Well, I would like to get an Epox board but it doesn't have bolt holes for the hsf.
I think I'll be looking for one of the Nvidia NF3 250Gb boards since they seem to be fairly decent right now.
I was also looking for something that would overclock with good fsb and voltage adjustments.
I am not a big fan of MSI motherboards, but it looks fairly decent now out of the options available.
How is the Asus board? I read the post over about the list of boards that will accept mobiles and DTRs, but if I have a hard time with getting a DTR to work I might just go with a Newcastle and the smaller cache. If I can get a board to use my old hsf with bolts, and if it's fairly reliable board with decent features, I would like to go with that.

It was so much easier last time when I got my Athlon XP setup. I had a really good board with lots of features, and it would overclock well, but this time it's not as easy.

What boards out right now have bolt holes for screw down hsf combos? What have a decent amount of fsb and voltage adjustments?

 

[jkresh]

asus board is good, though ddr voltage is still a problem. Dfi board also may be good. MSI can be good (if you get one that works) but may not be worth the effort.

 

[MDE]

What kind of screw down HSF are you talking about? The Athlon XP style or Athlon 64? For the A64 bolt down heatsinks you just take off the stock retention frame and bolt away.

 

[Mavrick007]

Well, is it possible to use an Athlon XP slk-900U on an Athlon 64 chip?
I think it would be with the DTR since it is just the core chip exposed anyway but probably not as good as the slk-948U since it has a larger base.

Would it work, or is the hole config unaligned for the slk-900U on a 754pin mobo?

So for the 754 pin mobos, it's more like the P4 retention clips for the hsf combos? You bolt it to the retention frame?

I haven't really seen any A64 setups firsthand, so I am not familiar with them. I had "planned" on skipping all of the 754 chips altogether and just getting a new mobo and cpu combo when the PCI-EX and the new vid cards come out on the 939pin mobos, but I have the itch to upgrade again.

I have heard people talking about taking off the backplates that come with the mobo to put on the custom backplate that is included with their hsf Thermalright combos, so I would guess that you would have to take the plate off and put the new one on and thus would need to screw bolts down through the mobo, which all boards, such as the Epox will not allow.

I would like to use the Epox, because I think it would have the best options for overclocking, even though it doesn't have a bios to support mobiles/dtrs, but it depends on the hsf that can be attached too.

So I have to look for a different board. I've heard of good things about the ASROCK, but it doesn't allow very high voltage settings, and the MSI is hit or miss, the ASUS is pretty new and haven't heard much about it besides mediocre voltage adjustments, haven't heard about the DFI at all really, the Chaintech is not that great, and I'm not sure what to think about the Gigabyte.

 

[Mavrick007]

I'm still looking for a decent mobo for a 754 Athlon 64 system.

Give me some ideas and say why it's a good mobo.

 

[Odeen]

There are no Athlon64 boards with SocketA bolt hole pattern. Period. A64 motherboards have two heatsink mounting holes, one above and one below the socket.

You can NOT attach a heatsink not designed for Athlon64 (S754 and S939 share the heatsink mounting design) on an A64. Period.

Some A64 heatsinks clip onto the plastic mounting frame that comes with the motherboard (somewhat similar to what P4 has been doing fo a while now.) Some A64 heatsinks bolt through the two holes, requiring removal of the retention frame. Take a look at the design of the Zalman CNPS7000A for a vivid example of such a design.

The ONLY possible exception is using a retention frame from a Thermalright XP-120 to attach a P4 heatsink on an A64. The retention frame looks like a P4 retention frame but with the two "pips" that go into the A64 mounting holes. This lets you use clip-on P4 heatsinks. Most clip-on P4 heatsinks, save for Thermalright XP120, are nothing special.

Good A64 heatsinks: Themalright SLK948U (note: the 947U is SocketA and Socket478 only, 948U adds the mounting capability for A64), Thermalright XP120, Alpha PAL8150 and Zalman CNPS7000-AlCU, CNPS7000-Cu, CNPS7000a-AlCU and CNPS7000a-CU. The list is a lot longer at this point, but you can't go wrong with either of these.

Good S754 board: MSI something-or-other Neo2 Platinum. Why: Onboard gigabit ethernet and firewall, onboard 4-channel SATA, nice design with RAM sitting horizontally at the very top of the motherboard. Your video card will never block DIMM clips again

Onboard gigabit is nice because it's not constricted by the 133megabyte/second speed of the PCI bus. Onboard 4-channel SATA lets you run 4 SATA drives or create RAID arrays, if you like, without, again, resorting to using the PCI bus. Most other manufacturers implement 2 nVidia-based SATA ports and 2-4 SATA ports based on a PCI SATA chip. 4-disk RAID arrays are thus impossible, and throughput of PCI-bound HD controllers is worse than chipset-level controllers.

 

[Mavrick007]

It's been awhile since I've been on the site but that information was what I was looking for Odeen. Thanx.

I wasn't able to see from the heatsinks that I saw online how they clipped on and thus it appeared that the AXP ones were very similar to the A64 hsf combos. That would mean that I will need to buy a new hsf combo as well, which will jack my price up another $30+. I haven't gone for an upgrade yet since my friend didn't upgrade his machine, but I did get a new sata drive.. I don't think I will ever go back to ide drives again.

I'm not a fan of MSI mobos, but I have had their vid cards and they're not bad at all. I don't know if I should stray from the brands I usually buy, such as Asus, Epox, Soltek. I have been thinking about the new DFI board though and I do believe that there's still life left in the 754 socket so I still might go with one.