Good board with AGP + PCIe?

[dwell]

I want to upgrade my A7N8X Deluxe to get a CPU something faster than the 2Ghz 2500+M but I want to keep my 6800GT (AGP) and PC3200 RAM.

What's a good mobo + cpu combo for bang for the buck right now that will allow me to keep some of the old parts, seeing I am on a budget right now?

 

[SynthDude2001]

The only real option for AGP+PCIe is the ASRock 939Dual-SATA2. I've been maintaining a thread about the board here for almost a year now. Great value board, and as I said, pretty much the only choice if you want real AGP and PCI-E. You could use your current video card and RAM with no issues (I used a 6800GT in mine for 6+ months until I bought my X1900XT two weeks ago). The board itself is about $65.

As far as CPU's, AMD has made pretty drastic price cuts on their single core Athlon 64's, and you can get pretty much anything from a 3000+ to a 3800+ for $150 or less now. However, if you don't need to upgrade immediately, and you can stand waiting a month, there's supposed to be another major price cut on July 24. The X2 3800+ (dual core) is supposed to drop to $169. That would be a killer upgrade from your XP (especially if you overclock), and it would cost well under $250 for the CPU and motherboard.

 

[dwell]

Awesome. That's why I ask here. My birthday is 7/29 so maybe I will hold out for the price drop on the CPU on the 24th

 

[mb103051]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813128286
this is a great motherboard ive used recently for 3 builds that needed agp cards.the owner had high end video cards and didnt like the asrock board because when he upgrades again he wanted to replace the motherboard with pcie but a year from now the asrock will be dated and much better boards will be out.
these gigabyte boards surprisingly o/clocked very well.i played around with one for a week.he had a64 3200 venice cpu in it.i had it up to 2.6 from stock of 2.0.
Its a very stable board and setup was easy.if the asrock isnt what you want then the gigabyte is a fine board to consider.layout is good,bios is recent and it looks good with the blue and silver colors.its only 63.00 dollars too.check it out and see what you think.it mite just be what your looking for.got to be better than a via solution.

 

[teiresias]

The Asrock isn't VIA based (I think) if that's what you were implying.

Still, this topic is of interest to me since I have an AGP x800GTO that I don't want to get rid of. I foolishly bought it like two months ago thinking I wasn't going to do a CPU upgrade, then came the AMD price drop rumours so I think I'll go ahead and bite.

I've been debating between the Asrock and Gigabyte solutions. I don't think I'd keep the motherboard around after moving on from a S939 CPU even if I had the Asrock as I don't think that upgrade board looks very stable, hehe!! Still, the main thing the Asrock seems to have going for it over the Gigabyte is the PCI-e slot so if I want to upgrade the graphics card in the future it won't necessarily require a mobo upgrade at that point. The Asrock also got some pretty nice benchmark scores here at AT - and quite frankly either upgrade will give me a good boost from my overclocked XP-M 2500+, the Asrock just presents a cheaper potential upgrade path in the nearer future - graphics card wise.

 

[OvErHeAtInG]

? the ASRock is ULi-based: I don't think anyone implied otherwise....

Overall, I'm quite happy with my ASRock. I agree that you probably won't use the PCIe upgrade slot for long, since once you have a PCIe card, you'll want to get a high-end board. However, I have since upgraded to PCIe. Both AGP and PCIe cards operate at full performance, and the board is quite stable once you get it running right. Performance is on par with a high-end board (minus the more fancy tweaking options). The only problem is the HTT can only go to 274 with the official BIOS. this limits your OC to 2466 on a 9x-multi CPU, but I don't think anyone will be using a 9x CPU when building right now.

I'd love to upgrade to a higher-end board, but the only reason to besides the higher OC would be onboard firewire and HD onboard audio. Not quite worth it at this point

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: OvErHeAtInG
? the ASRock is ULi-based: I don't think anyone implied otherwise....

Overall, I'm quite happy with my ASRock. I agree that you probably won't use the PCIe upgrade slot for long, since once you have a PCIe card, you'll want to get a high-end board. However, I have since upgraded to PCIe. Both AGP and PCIe cards operate at full performance, and the board is quite stable once you get it running right. Performance is on par with a high-end board (minus the more fancy tweaking options). The only problem is the HTT can only go to 274 with the official BIOS. this limits your OC to 2466 on a 9x-multi CPU, but I don't think anyone will be using a 9x CPU when building right now.

I'd love to upgrade to a higher-end board, but the only reason to besides the higher OC would be onboard firewire and HD onboard audio. Not quite worth it at this point

Not true anymore, (official) BIOS 1.80 and later remove the 274 lock

 

[OvErHeAtInG]

You're kidding me!!! OK I'm updating ASAP. Shoulda kept up with your thread, huh? Damn, one less reason to get an A8R32-MVP....