Socket 754 board and RAM compatability

[uesjd]

I'm planning to build a computer around an Athlon 64 and I've read enough problem reports about various motherboards to be concerned about which one to buy.

I know that these boards are fairly fussy about RAM. Is there one board that is less fussy than the others and less likely to give me problems? (I do not intend to overclock; I just want something that won't give me a lot of trouble.)

Also, which board mfrs. have the best quality control and customer support if things don't go smoothly?

Any insights will be appreciated.

 

[Peter]

As with socket-A boards, they aren't so much fussy about the RAM. "Demanding" is the word. At any clock speed, the Athlon-64 will push hard on the RAM traffic - and if the DIMM isn't really 100 percent up to its own specification, it'll fail. We've had that situation when everyone was migrating from slower platforms to socket-A, reusing existing SDRAM DIMMs. Tons of people were finding out that their DIMMs were failing miserably, although they'd been working just fine in the slower boxes they were taken from.

Now with the AMD64 processor being fairly flexible in DIMM clocking, there's always the option of backing down on the clock speed if your RAM isn't up to the job.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I wouldn't stress over customer support because you'll get better help here and if you buy from a good vendor like Newegg, zipzoomfly, or Mwave they will make RMAing faulty/flakey hardware easy on you. Now, given you have no plans to overclock I'll suggest an inexpensive board and ram for the A64 of your choice.

Buffalo 3200DDR $109

Asrock K8S8X $85

The Asrock looks to be playing well with different brands of memory and it's very fast@stock speed. Combined that with the fact it comes with SATA RAID for a very low price and you have a great value :beer: BTW, don't sweat getting fast ram with CAS2 since the performance difference faster timings make with the A64 is very small/unnoticable.