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Mobo suggestions for newb?

S

SkipE

Member

Hi,

I'm planning on building my first. Have a lot of computer experience, but I've never built one of my own. I was leaning toward Abit because it seems to me that from the reading I've done, they have the best manuals. This could be very important for a newb, no? But I've also read (or I guess this is really my own unscientific poll) that go Asus for the best quality. Also, I believe that Abit makes overclocking the easiest. Believe I read you can do it in the BIOS, whereas for the latest KT133A board from Asus you had to do it with jumpers.

Any suggestions for a newb?

One other item. My aim is to have the fastest floating point I can get for the money. From the reviews I've read, there doesn't seem to be much point of going over to DDR-SDRAM. But I believe most of the benchmarks are all typical Windows type stuff. What if one does 90% floating-point runs (I do scientific programming)? Might not the DDR-SDRAM begin to show significant improvements over SDRAM then? Since most of the stuff I'm doing consists of iterating over the same set of data (matrix-vector multiplies), seems like the double data rate in and out of memory should give me a big boost.

Thanks for any help,
Skip Egley
 
well, I am in a similar situation. I am gonna be building my first comp (and like you I have experience, buty never building).
What I'd suggest is to get an Asus, not an Abit

the reason is that he Asus is FAR more stable than the abit and at the same time performs better. About the manuals, they are pretty much the same. Neither Abits nor Asus' are better.


for the cpu I'd go with the 1.2GHz since it looks you'll actually be using all the power provided 🙂

As for DDR, I am not sure. check out this review (its quite detailed). I'm sure you'll find what you're looking for.


Also, if you are not in a hurry like me, you might want to wait until dual athlons solutions surface.
 
Thanks Pyro. Read that review - very good. Looks pretty much like what I thought. Start stressing the memory and you'll start to see DDR take the lead.

Now, if I could just get the price down on that DDR-RAM...

SkipE
 
Well, first off I'm not so sure that Asus is "FAR more stable" than Abit as Pyro is claiming (at least where KT133a boards are concern). Most reviews I have read, including Anandtech's, clearly state that both of these board are very very stable platforms. Secondly, the Asus KT133a board has full board control from the bios, using the jumpers is an option, not a requirement.

I have no good understanding regarding the floating point issue but most reviewers are leaning toward the 133a SDRAM platform instead of DDR due the the cost/performance ratio.

Lastly, check the forum feedback on both of these boards via the search feature. Some of the KT133a boards have an issue with resetting the clock mulit. during startup. I don't have all the details but I think this issue deserves research. Good luck.
 
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