Help! Which 939 board would you recommend?

[Bghead8che]

I have an ABIT K8T800 Pro MOBO on order for $139.00. I'm looking for the most stable board that is friendly to OCing (FX-53).

Should I have gone w/ the new ASUS or Gigabyte boards? I don't really need all the fancy wifi and RAID features.

What would you do? Stick w/ the ABIT or get another board?

Any help would be appreciated!

-Brian

 

[imported_michaelpatrick33]

Since you are getting the FX-53, with great cooling you could just raise the multiplier to 13 and get essentially a FX-55 on any 939 motherboard whose bios supports it. Then you don't have to worry about any other settings such as memory, HTT etc! Get good cooling and good luck

Remember the pci/agp lock on the K8T800 Pro's are flaky and working to not working at all.

 

[nycxandy]

The locks on my A8V Deluxe are working.

 

[imported_michaelpatrick33]

"The locks on my A8V Deluxe are working."

That is great! Were they working out of the box or did you get a bios upgrade? Awesome. I am thinking about getting a FX-53 for my dangerden watercooling rig and haven't decided on the motherboard. How do you like the A8V Deluxe?

 

[Bghead8che]

Do you guys think I should stick w/ the ABIT board? I have no idea if it will be locked or not.

Since they are based on the same chipset they should perform roughly the same, no?

 

[imported_michaelpatrick33]

Call ABit and ask or send an email.

How are you planning on overclocking your FX-53? By raising the multiplier like I suggested (both boards should do that the same as the bios on each board should go up to a 14 multiplier for the FX. It doesn't matter if the board's pci/agp lock is working or not when you raise just the multiplier

 

[Bghead8che]

By raising the mult. to 14 what speed will I be running at? This is my first time building my own computer. My goal was a to overclock to at least 2.6 or 200mhz.

How does the automatic overclocking feature work on the ASUS board? Anyone tried it?

 

[imported_michaelpatrick33]

Don't use the automatic overclocking feature. The FX-53 runs at 200(HTT) x 12(Multiplier) =2400. With good cooling! you should be able to raise your multiplier to 200(HTT) x 13(Multiplier) = 2600 without changing any other feature (except cpu voltage of course). That is the advantage of the FX (the price being its major disadvantage)

The fourteen multiplier is usually the maximum multiplier that the bios will offer for the FX processors. Of course reaching 2800 is possible on phase change but I seriously doubt water cooling and definitely air cooling will get close to 2800. 2700+ is possible with good watercooling probably.

 

[Compddd]

The Abit AV8 is the biggest hunk of sh*t I have ever had the misfortune of using. The locks don't work, you can't run your RAM at Cas 2 or 1T or WindowsXP will blue screen like crazy. The uGuru crap they advertise with it misreads your temps all the time. I wanted the Asus A8V but the Abit was all they had at Frys so I decided to give it a try, BIG MISTAKE. Don't use the Abit AV8 if you value stability.

 

[nycxandy]

Originally posted by: michaelpatrick33
"The locks on my A8V Deluxe are working."

That is great! Were they working out of the box or did you get a bios upgrade? Awesome. I am thinking about getting a FX-53 for my dangerden watercooling rig and haven't decided on the motherboard. How do you like the A8V Deluxe?

I don't know if they were working out of the box or not, I didn't check.

I'm currently running on the 1005.021 Beta bios I got off bleedinedge.com.

SetFSB and ClockGen both report that the AGP and PCI are locked at 66 and 33, respectively.

I like the A8V Deluxe. There is a long thread over at Xtreme Systems Forums. >> LINK HERE! <<

 

[iboomalot]

I think my locks on my A8V are not working due to artifacts on the screen and
when I go over 225mhz it stops reading the HD correctly and I get corrupted files.

also one of my raptors when in raid is dead now from trying to run at a measly
230 mhz FSB.

I got plenty of room to OC if locks were working.


my question is what prog. are you using that shows the clocks on the a8v ??

so far I haven't found one

thanks for your help

 

[nycxandy]

SetFSB and ClockGen.

 

[Brickster]

Brian -

Go for the Gigabyte GA-K8NSNXP-939. It's solid as a rock and has benchmarked well. The locks work, and is base don the Nvidia nForce3 chipset - which means a potential performance gain when paired with a Geforce VGA card.

I love this board, and it has tons of features.

Cheers,