New RIG: which MB?

[Rhezuss]

Hello all, i'm new here and I like those forums a lot. Lots of great advices and helpful infos.

I'm planning on getting to the PCI-E side and i've been looking for a great stable and performance wise motherboard to get. I already have a Athlon64 3200+ Venice core so i'd like to go with a socket 939 to keep the cpu. I never owned a nVidia mobo (shame on me) and most of my mobos were ASUS.

Now my dilemma, nForce 4 Ultra or nForce 4 SLI ?!?

For the near future I don't think i'll go with a SLI build, but we never know. So which chipset would be the best and which brand should be the best?

By the way i'm not into overclocking, I know I should, it's just i'm really not into it since it takes lots of time to achieve a good OC.

Thanks for your advices.

 

[aLeoN]

Welcome, I was looking for the same thing a couple months ago myself.

SLI imo wasn't worth it for me so I looked into the Ultras instead of SLI. My list was (probably in this order):
DFI UT LANPARTY NF4 ULTRA-D <-- board I have now
EPoX EP-9NPA+ Ultra
ASUS A8N-E

Now assuming I wanted to upgrade to SLI later my list would change into:
ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe
DFI UT LANPARTY NF4 SLI-D
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium
EPoX EP-9NPA+ SLI
As a small note, my ultra-d can be unofficially modded into an SLI board, albeit w/o the SLI bridge which I could ebay for or something.

The real deciding factor for me getting the DFI were for these 3 reasons:
1) Newegg had a really good special that brought the ultra-d and sli-d down to ASUS prices during black friday.
2) I've built 2 computers (and upgraded a couple more from way back) recently within the past 2 years so I knew that I'd be fiddling around in BIOS anyway.
3) Power connectors were very very convienent for me on the DFI as I have a P180 so my PSU barely reached everything. If I had gotten an ASUS I'd proabably have to get an extension for my ATX12v and maybe the 24 pin while the EPoX I could have gotten away with it w/o extensions.

Others would also reccommend the MSI, Abit, etc. and I don't doubt their decisions, it's just that I wanted the "best" performance for the $ which in itself is highly arguable. BTW, nice rig, I should have gotten something like yours instead when I built my last comp. Same mobo but with a 3700+ and a 6600GT was where the $ was shifted, but I saved by getting a nice $140 19" CRT. 🙂