Should I get a new motherboard?

[majewski9]

I have an Iwill KK266 and a 1.33ghz Athlon Tbird. Now performance seems pretty fine to me, but I cannot get over 3dmark 2001 scores and other benchmarks being posted by other Athlons. My Iwill was a very good board when I bought it. I mean it was almost outperforming DDR boards with SDRAM and pretty much all other KT133A boards as well. Now that the KT266A, Nforce, SIS 735, and ALI Magik C are all out I am feeling that I need to upgrade my board. There are so many great boards out though and a lot of other factors to consider.

Nforce seems an unlikely choice for since I dont need intergrated audio or video. There are only a couple SIS 735 boards ECS k7s5a and the Leadtek board. The Iwill xp333 is the only ALI magik c board there is. I like the fact in can support 333 fsb and DDR333. There are plenty of KT266A boards out there. The two that I like the most are the Epox EP-8KHA+ and the Shuttle AK31A. The shuttle can be had for 80$ at Newegg and the Epox board is probaly one of the best performing Athlon boards out there.

The boards I have narrowed it down are!

Leadtek 7350KDA (sis 735) good performer
ECS K7S5A (sis 735) cheap!
IWILL XP333 (magik) very good performer when using DDR333
Epox 8kha+ (kt266a) great performance
Shuttle Ak31A 80$

I kinda want to wait for SIS 745 , but will it be able to dethrone KT266A? I have no idea on which board I should get, but with these DDR prices right now I can wait!

 

[FlippyBoy]

i am in almost the same boat as you. i have a kk266 right now as well (with a slightly slower processor - duron@935)), and thinking about upgrading. i think my next upgrade is gonna be to the epox board you mentioned above and to an athlonxp. what do you do with your system? unless you do stuff that is very cpu/memory intensive, you probably wont notice the difference between your setup and a kt266a setup, especially with a 1.33 athlon.

 

[AMDPwred]

I would wait a little while longer for true DDR333 and pick up the IWILL XP333. Oh and wait for AMD CPUs to officially support that board too

If you really want an upgrade now get the Shuttle AK31A. I love this board. Can't say enough about it.

 

[majewski9]

I have been lately doing a lot of video encoding, some photoshop, and cd burning. I dont really need a much faster system, but I sorta of broke my PS2 port on my IWILL! I also have an ATA 133 hard dirve so a move to a board that has ATA 133 would be nice.

 

[Bovinicus]

Keep your motherboard. Get a new video card. The LE is what is holding back performance. The motherboard won't do that much. Get a nice GF3 Ti200, that will probably double your scores, maybe more.

 

[chriskjel]

Iagree with Bovinicus, a new MB won't do much at all if anything. The Raedon LE isn't a very good 3d card, upgrade that first.

 

[Yoshi]

I think it is a bit early for you. I'm just barely starting to feel old school and I'm running a BX board with a PIII700@933. I have had this setup for over a year and a half.

 

[DCFife]

I have an AK31A v3.1 with an XP 1600+/GeForce3/512MB Crucial DDR. My wife has an Iwill KK266+R with a TBird 1.4/GeForce 2 Pro/512MB Crucial SDRAM. I get over 7000 3DMarks, she gets right at 4000. My SiSoft memory scores are about 50% higher than hers (I can't remember exactly). You know what? I can't tell the darn difference! Numbers are just that...numbers. If you really think getting some higher benchmarks will give you the edge in gaming, then I'd have to say that you're at least slightly delusional (sorry, I'm not trying to be mean, just realistic and honest). Stick with what you've got and wait for another generation or two of chipset/memory/GPU combos to come out before you upgrade a system that sounds perfectly fine.