Motherboard to upgrade to??

[Mustanggt]

Hi all I have not been keeping up with all the advancing of hardware , I have a Nforce2 with mobile barton@2.2 GHZ what AMD motherboard would be a good upgrade where I can start out with low end cpu and upgrade cpu in a year using same board?? any info or help would save me so much reading time, Thanks

 

[arswihart]

want to keep your AGP card (what is it?), or go PCI-express, thats a big question you need to focus on first, it looks like at least ATI will offer AGP versions of some of their next-gen cards, I'm not sure about nvidia. You'll probably want to go with a socket 939 mobo, as socket 754 is getting phased out slowly.

If you want AGP, I suggest the Epox 9nda3+ (or 9nda3j), based on nforce3

Also good are the Asus A8V or Abit AV8 both VIA chipset based

 

[theMan]

also for agp. msi k8n neo2 plat. otherwise for pcie go nf4.

 

[Mustanggt]

Thanks for reply, I have a AGP Radeon 9800 That I want to keep, I do video editng the most I dont play games.

 

[arswihart]

Be sure to read up on the msi, look all over the net at different msi motherboard forums, there are some horrible experiences to be found with many users swearing off msi forever secondary to defective mobo's and horrible RMA experiences. There are of course lots of people with no problems whatsoever but I'd rather not play this game if I were you.

I can say I haven't seen anything like this for the 9nda3+ series or the A8V/AV8, lots of happy customers with these boards.

 

[Mustanggt]

arswihart thanks for help, I have had my share of bad MSI boards after the last one I swore no more MSI. I need a PC for my teenage daughter I was going to just by a Dell and be done with it but those PCs are so cheap that I might as well upgrade mine and give here my 2.2 Barton machine.

 

[arswihart]

If I were buying one today I'd get a 9nda3j ($90 shipped @ newegg), some corsair value RAM ($77.90 shipped @ newegg, see the hot deals forum) and whatever cheap CPU you want. That RAM is just too cheap to pass up even if you have to relax the timings, its still 1 gig and you can probably run it up to 230mhz or so.

Then later this summer your best move would be to get a 4400+ Athlon X2 in my opinion. Even if its $550 or so, if it OC's to 2.8ghz I'd grab it before they start re-specing the cpu. Its like what happened with the CBBID revisions of the Athlon64 (I got stuck with one before I knew what was going on). If the initial batch doesn't OC to 2.8 ghz on average, I'll have to think twice about upgrading. Sorry to get off topic, but maybe that is relavent to you.

 

[Mustanggt]

The cheapest 939 cpu is $150 AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Winchester ??

 

[arswihart]

yeah thats good, either that or the 3200+ winchester

read up on A64 OC'ing, its not as clear cut as you would think, lots of processor revisions and memory interactions you may not consider

the 3200+ has the 10 multiplier whice the 3000+ doesn't, and it may be useful

its hard to explain in a few short sentences why you may want to consider the 3200+ over the 3000+, so I'd just suggest reading about how to OC with the A64, there are lots of ways to go about it but you should tailor your approach to your processor (and available multipliers) and your memory (some say preserving good timings is better than a higher overclock)

go to the CPU forum to learn more