Help choosing a 939 mobo

[trueimage]

I would like to get some feedback on a decent mid to upper-range 939 board. Ther are rumoured to be forward compatible with the dual core cpus coming out right? That's the goal. Get an Athlon 64 now then upgrade to the dual core when they drop a bit.

Here are the parts I'm keeping from my old pc:
WD SATA hd
2x 512mb Kingston HyperX PC4000 DDR

Things I would like:
PCI Express (why not if I'm going forward)
USB 2.0
4 DDR slots (I wanna get two more sticks to have 2GB ram... let me know if I should change RAM anyway
DDR2 (I could then sell my ram.. and get DDR2... does AMD use it yet? I'm out of the loop)

Any other suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[jose]

Get the DFI Ultra-D, I've had zero problems going on 4 weeks.

What ever you do, don't get the Asus a8n-sli. I've gotten 2 dead mobo's..

Now I am getting a dual opteron mobo because I'm feed up w/ Asus and I need a parallel port.

Check my sig for specs.

Good Luck

Regards,
Jose

 

[Nebben]

I second that motion.

DFI LanParty UT Ultra-D

Excellent stability, endless BIOS options for overclocking and tweaking, and very nice onboard features (Boot to Memtest86, Onboard NVIDIA Firewall, Onboard 8CH sound)

I've been running my new setup for about a week and it's overclocked from 1.8 to 2.4GHZ and totally stable under immense stress.

I used to be an ASUS guy... I've since changed my mind about them. They're okay, but many boards have some issues and I'm hearing some of the newer ones aren't great for OCing.

The DFI board I'm running has won countless awards, too, so it's not just me pushing my own setup

 

[trueimage]

cool, never heard of DFI... I've always had asus, abit, ecs, msi...

 

[trueimage]

on another note, should I perhaps sell my khx4000 and get pc3200 ram?

 

[EternusNox]

DFI or Abit Fatality

 

[trueimage]

I tried looking up the DFI on pricewatch.. I'm only seeing it at $140ish... is that the one? And what Athlon 64 cpu would go with it to match a p4 prescott 3.2 GHz 1mb l2 chip?

 

[Nebben]

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=246486-OP

The price on this board has dropped about $20 since I bought it.. it's $124 w/ free 2nd day shipping at ZipZoomFly.

About the RAM, I see no reason to sell it -- if you intend to overclock having higher-end RAM will be only helpful.

About the processor, it really depends what you want to spend. You can get an A64 3000+ (Winchester, 1.8GHZ) for $150 shipped, while a 3800+ (2.4 GHZ) is around $385. In most cases with the Winchester (939) processors, you can achieve a very good overclock without too much effort. I'm using stock cooling and value ram, and I've overclocked quite well. My $150 processor is now essentially the same as a $385 processor, and I may still add more on to that.


The only issue I've had with my new setup is that in order to get into the WinXP setup I had to disable the onboard USB controller, because for some reason it was causing the setup to hang as it was opening. Then I just had to enable it after the setup reboots for the first time, and all is well.

If you do end up going with the DFI, check out http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/index.php? -- there's some good support there, especially for overclocking.

 

[ChineseDemocracyGNR]

That link (DFI for $125) is for a refurbished mobo.

 

[Thurgo0dy]

Here's a link for the DFI at Newegg... More expensive at zipzoomfly.

 

[Nebben]

Oops. Didn't notice the refurbished part. My apologies.

 

[crazyeddie]

DDR2 isn't supported yet on any AMD platforms. 4 DIMM slots for Dual Channel support is common, though.

MSI has a Radeon Xpress 200 chipset motherboard out called the MSI RS480M2-IL. It's a microATX board for Socket 939. It has a good integrated video chip as well as a 16X PCI-E slot. You can use the IGP in conjunction with a PCI-E graphics card and the built-in Cinema Display feature for a 3 monitor desktop setup.

It has 4 SATA ports, 2 ATA 133 ports, and SATA RAID 0/1/0+1 support. It has Gigabit Ethernet, 8 USB 2.0 ports, 3 Firewire ports, and AC '97 5.1 audio with a coaxial s/pdif digital out. It also has 4 DIMM slots, supports Dual Channel, and can hold up to 4Gb of memory.

The one drawback? The board doesn't have any overclocking features at all. It's a terrific and inexpensive choice (about $90 shipped), but only if you run your cpu and memory at stock speeds.

This board has been popular when paired with an Antec Aria SFF case to build your own HTPC.

 

[imported_Kensai]

Quite so. I'd suggest the MSI K8N Neo4 SLI board.

 

[Promethply]

Have a very good experience with ASUS A8N-SLI/A8N-SLI deluxe mobos: They are very stable, and can overclock my AMD64 "3500+" to 2585MHz stably @ 1.5V.

 

[orenb]

Originally posted by: crazyeddie
It has 4 SATA ports, 2 ATA 133 ports, and SATA RAID 0/1/0+1 support. It has Gigabit Ethernet, 8 USB 2.0 ports, 3 Firewire ports, and AC '97 5.1 audio with a coaxial s/pdif digital out. It also has 4 DIMM slots, supports Dual Channel, and can hold up to 4Gb of memory.

The specs on MSI's website are a bit different. LAN is only 10/100, there are 4 USB 2.0 port and one Firewire port (the rest are headers). Nevertheless, it looks like a great board. I would buy it this second if I could verify BeOS support.

Prog.