Need help choosing an AthlonXP Motherboard

[Chu]

Hello all. I am trying to find an AthlonXP board, and am having a little trouble. I've browsed the forums a bit, but my requirements differ a little from the norm. I need a board that is 100% stable, and can be upgraded from 512MB of memory to 1GB of memory in the future without replacing any sticks. Looking around this board I noticed most of the reccomended systems had 3 DIMM slots and were dual channel, so that second requirement is a little bit of a pain.

Thanks in advance,

-Chu

P.S., why do the nForce2 boards have 3 slots? Can these be run in single or dual channel mode?

 

[niggles]

I'm not an expert so I wont' tell you what to get, but I really think if you spend about 20 minutes reading this board you'll answer your own question.

 

[MDE]

I'll save you some time, Abit NF7 or NF7-S, or the Asus A7N8X series if you don't like Abit.

 

[Neyd3400]

I have Epox nforce2 board and it's been a really good board. I was running a 512 mb stick of pc3000 Kingston HyperX memory for a while and she ran real nice. I had a few sticks of pc2700 valueram (256mb) lying around, so I put them in 6 months later. A big improvement with the extra memory. Bios tells me that I am running dual channel with a 2x256mb + 512= 1026mb. Dual channel is a little overated IMO. I noticed a much bigger improvement when I went from 512 to 1 gig, than I did going from single to dual.

So to make it short you can run dual and still have three sticks in the board. At least with the Epox I could, I would think that most if not all nforce Ultra 2 boards let you do this.

What kind of system are you looking to having, CPU, memory, harddrives, Video, Sound. Because you could get a biostar or shuttle board for ~60 dollars at Newegg if that is all your concerned with(Reviews really look good). Newegg is great to deal with too. I myself certainly wouldn't spend a 100+ on a board when I will probably upgrade at the end of the year when Pci express comes out and 64bit cpu drop in price.

Newegg Nforce Ultra 2 Boards

 

[NEVERwinter]

what's the problem with dual-channel? You can use it with a single stick as well... say put a 512megs for now, and you can add another 512megs later. There is no big performance difference between single and dual channel.

P.S., why do the nForce2 boards have 3 slots? Can these be run in single or dual channel mode?

yes, it can. It's automatically set to dual channel when you only plug a single stick.

I'll save you some time, Abit NF7 or NF7-S, or the Asus A7N8X series if you don't like Abit.

I'll second that, though I'm an EPoX 8RDA+ user... those two series are great or get Albatron's nForce2 mobo (forgot the model) for a cheaper solution.

 

[NEVERwinter]

*dual-post