Mobos that Mattered Most (a MaximumPC article)

[Perknose]

Thanks, OP! I have fond, fond memories of Abit boards and celly 300's! :wub:

 

[tcsenter]

Thanks, OP! I have fond, fond memories of Abit boards and celly 300's!

You have fond memories of the first mass produced automobile.

 

[ReefaMadness]

You have fond memories of the first mass produced automobile.

Would that be your way of saying that fella has been around for a long while???

 

[StrangerGuy]

In hindsight, everyone else other than Abit sucked at making OC friendly mobos until the nForce 2 era. Nowadays, even budget G41 mobos can overclock pretty well.

 

[BTA]

ECS K7S5A PRO

I came to post this. Hard to argue with the cost/performance/value of this board. It had quite an impact on the market imo.

I still think it was a perfectly solid board if you used good memory and PSU.

Unfortunately the people that bought it were usually also cheap, so they bought the cheapest possible ram. Plus this was back in the day when not many people put much thought into what PSU they bought.

 

[slag]

Yes, the Abit BH6 was a popular tweakers board, but the Asus P2B was the stability king. Even in Abit's BH6 heyday, the #1 choice for reliability was still the P2B.

Agreed. I had a P2B that overclocked my Celeron 266 to 448 mhz. Blew through EVERYTHING. Cache be damned, that chip was uber fast at 112 mhz bus speed.

I still use D975XBX in my home theater PC, coupled with an E4300 chip overclocked to 3 ghz. That thing just runs and runs and runs and is a pillar of stability.

 

[ComputerWizKid]

I had an Asus A7N8X Deluxe back in the day. I also had an A7N8X-E Deluxe
I also remember back in 1999-2000 I bought a Abit KT7-A I sprung for the 1GHZ Athlon Chip (Just for the cool factor as 1GHZ was a breakthrough back then:biggrin

 

[electroju]

what did ABIT in? was it the capacitor issues of the early part of the decade? or did they just merge/spit/ect into something else?

The problem with Abit is that someone taking revenge on Abit by suing them. Eric Schonning sued Abit because of a faulty motherboards. From what I found on the Internet, Schonning has a lot of problems with his consumer electronics like TV, VCR, DVD, and others, so he had a lot of rage. The rage turned into revenge against Abit. Since Schonning won his lawsuit against Abit, Abit have to fix all motherboards that had known problems. I got a letter that Abit will fix my motherboard, but I already went through one RMA process and I do not want to go through another since my KA7-100 is already working fine at the time. I am thinking to go through the process with badcaps.net to splurge on higher quality capacitors.

Eric Schonning should not have won because the lawsuit was based on revenge and not on justice.

 

[Ruger22C]

"FIC SD11"
...

what.. is this?

 

[JETninja]

I had the MSI K7T266 Pro 2, was my first PC build back in '01, PCPER was a godsend of a site for help with it. For awhile I had the #3 overclock spot at the old PCMark (IIRC) website....

Surprised the Abit NF7S wasn't on it, it was the best of the nForce2's and they sold a ton...mine still chugs along.

 

[Elcs]

ASUS A7N8X represent.

I definitely think the IC7-G belonged on that list though.

I find it hilarious that they can put the ASUS A7N8X board on that list.

Despite being feature packed, it was plagued with quality issues throughout it's lifetime even if it was a good board, when it worked. I remember all of the fun of several real life computer friends and the Anandtech Forums filled with complaints about this board from seasoned users with issues... and about as many praising it for being a great board.

The ABIT NF7-S Rev 2.0 (not the NF7-S2) was the real king of the NForce 2 motherboards, encorporating the best bios with extremely capable overclocking settings and Soundstorm 5.1 onboard sound.

 

[Gillbot]

"FIC SD11"
...

what.. is this?

I believe that was a Slot A board.

 

[Ruger22C]

Slot A, like.. the CPU went into a slot, not a socket?

 

[TBSN]

Wow I LOVE the tube board! HORRIBLE idea but their mind is in the right place!


Also, WHAT is that tiny green heatsink-like thing on the CPU sockets of the mobos on the first page? Is it the socket, or a socket cover? Those were before my time I'm afraid.

 

[Gillbot]

Slot A, like.. the CPU went into a slot, not a socket?

Yes, Slot A was the AMD counterpart to Intel's Slot 1.

I had quite a few of those boards on that list.

 

[jacktesterson]

Love the list.

The ECS K7S5A motherboard should be there in my opinion.

It was cheap, stable and outperformed many of the big brand boards.

I built so many systems with that board for people for value end systems and I never had ANY problems. My father still has one going strong as spare office pc.

 

[Howard]

Love the list.

The ECS K7S5A motherboard should be there in my opinion.

It was cheap, stable and outperformed many of the big brand boards.

I built so many systems with that board for people for value end systems and I never had ANY problems. My father still has one going strong as spare office pc.

It was certainly cheap and performed better than average, but I can't vouch for its stability. I can't remember what it was but a mobo swap fixed it for me.

(long time ago)

 

[bryanl]

The article is so uninteresting and so unimportant that it's worthy of the John Dvorak Award For Anti-Excellence.

 

[crucibelle]

The article is so uninteresting and so unimportant that it's worthy of the John Dvorak Award For Anti-Excellence.

Thanks for sharing your opinion. I think most people on this thread enjoyed it. To each their own.

 

[Arg Clin]

I'm on an A7N8X-Deluxe right now. Main rig even.

It belongs in a museum - literally.

wow.. MS-6167 .. that sure does bring back memories. Those were the good times, when Athlons broke the GHz mark with the goldfinger OC device, and put those puny PIII's in their place

 

[Gillbot]

Everyone has their own opinion as to what SHOULD be on there. Personally, I'd like to see more Super Socket 7 boards on there as IMHO that's what really started the PC "wars".

 

[electroju]

Everyone has their own opinion as to what SHOULD be on there. Personally, I'd like to see more Super Socket 7 boards on there as IMHO that's what really started the PC "wars".

That is not true. The PC wars started during the 80386. During the Socket 7 and Super Socket 7 days, it started the over clock era even though Intel created a few accelerator chips before this time.

 

[chucky2]

I agree with Gillbot though...the Super-7 era was when Intel and AMD parted ways on sockets and chipset, and even CPU's - although obviously they both support x86.

For the first time, AMD was totally on its own to push forward its CPU designs, chipset to support that CPU, and even the CPU socket itself. Unfortunately AMD farmed out the chipset part to the likes of VIA, which ended up costing them dearly...

Chuck

 

[Arg Clin]

One might argue that it was with the K5 / Pentium that the 'PC wars' started. The K5 was AMD's first original design (well at least non-intel design)

I recall having debates over the topic of using a K6 over a Pentium counterpart - (us) AMD users really did not get much streetcredit back then

I agree with Gillbot and chucky2 though, so far as it really picked up with the super7.

 

[Gillbot]

Yeah, Super 7 is what started all of what we have now IMHO. Before that, you could basically seamlessly go from one or the other. With Super 7, people really got into their hardware, overclocking and that's when everyone started "picking sides" because from there on out, once you picked a platform you were stuck. There was no Slot A Intel board, nor LGA775 AMD Cpu.

S7 started it, then we went to Slot 1/SlotA, Socket 370/Socket A. After that the gap started to widen when Intel went S 478 then LGA775, LGA1366 where AMD went S 754, 939 then AM2 and etc.

I'm obviously skipping over quite a few such as Socket 8 for the PPro and etc but most here would agree that the general consumer wasn't into these as much so I just covered the mainstream interfaces.