socket 939 AGP motherboard opinions needed..

[curtisbouvier]

Hello, I am currently running a thunderbird 1.33 ghz right now with an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, the video card is fine for everything, the cpu HAS TO GO.. lol no joke.

I've done some research and I was just wondering what the difference is between the Gigabyte GA-K8NSC nForce3 and the Gigabyte GA-K8NS is..... they look practically the same...

I've read they are both great motherboards, Also if you could suggest, is this a good motherboard as a whole? has it had alot of problems in the past or what would you guys reccomend? For the most part I would just like to play new games like FEAR, HL2, WoW Etc... And not get 2-5 frames a second because of the CPU and memory bandwidth lol.

I also have an Exos external water cooling system, with all the neccessary upgrades for the A64 slot. So cooling is not a problem. I have plans to buy the A64 3700 for this motherboard as it's pretty much the in the sweet spot for price range.

Any opinions / advice would greatly be appreciated.

thank you

 

[pkme2]

I recommend ASUS A8N SLI Dlx or Premium. or you can go with Gigabyte, your choice.

 

[mb103051]

either one of those gigabyte boards are fine but agp is fast going out of mainstreem.if you have to keep your agp card then the asrock 939 dual sata2 board is a great board.it runs agp and pcie.it runs agp at full speed and when your ready pcie is waiting onboard too.it o/clocks well and has a large following of users .its about 65-70 dollars and truley is a real deal for someone like you.other than buying the gigabyte board you should really think about going pcie with the next mobo.or go with the asrock.ck it out and read about it.its a great board.

 

[SolMiester]

My board is okay, good features including 800mhz firewire, sata raid, dual bios/lan . Think its done its best @ 245 fsb, sure you could find a better clocker for your w/cooling.

edit..Oh, the k8nsc has the slower HTT/FSB of 1600mhz

 

[chaosarchitect]

"it runs agp and pcie.it runs agp at full speed and when your ready pcie is waiting onboard too"

How does that work? What's the exact model number so that I can look up? Perhaps a direct link to some product discription/online store?

Would be awsome for my planned ugprade - using my old AGP card while getting more funs for a good PCI-E card.

 

[curtisbouvier]

next build I will definitly put together a PCI-E computer, for now tho Everything I have will run with this small upgrade, (hard drive, video card, sound card, etc, etc) which is why I only really need the cpu/ram/mobo. I got my athlon T-Bird 1.33 ghz running at 1.86 a few years ago but that was with the multiplier lol.. no real plans to do any heavy over clocking with this, I just need somthing that can get me playable frame rates for the moment.

I've put together alot of computers in the past however not recently, my terms are slightly out of date. What board Exactly is the AS-Rock? (ASUS A8N SLI Dlx or Premium?) like pkme2 says?

I plan to run Crucial Ballistix PC3200 memory with this setup, not very good for overclocking but I will save the overclocking for the next BIG upgrade =D hehe.

 

[curtisbouvier]

Ohhh I see, I thought the ASRock was some sort of Asus board hehe.

"it runs agp and pcie.it runs agp at full speed and when your ready pcie is waiting onboard too."

^^ That's somthing I would like to hear about in detail or a small summary of some sort, If anybody knows a little about that and could post some benefits of going asrock over the gigabyte, much would be appreciated ^_^ once again thanks for the help with this, much appreciated.

 

[curtisbouvier]

Chaos, I would assume it has somthing to do with this...

M1695's innovative HyperTransport tunnel architecture integrates non-blocking symmetrical HyperTransportTM 2.0 links which enables motherboard manufacturers and system integrators to pair up M1695 with other high performance HyperTransport-based chipsets and bridge devices either natively or via the HTXTM connector. When coupled with ULi's M1567 south bridge, the combination offers motherboard manufacturers the unprecedented capability to support PCI Express x16, AGP 8X, PCI graphics cards simultaneously on the same mainboard. Such capability makes it possible to create a fully surrounding virtual reality environment using multiple high resolution displays driven by the three graphics technologies residing in the same computer system."

So this board is non via OR nforce... lol thats cool I like that.. that would also mean I need to predownload the latest drivers from somewhere for the motherboard kinda like Via 4 in1 but for ULI?..

 

[Peter]

Right. M1695 is a HT-PCIE tunnel, forking off PCIE and passing HT through. It can be used with any random HT-enabled chipset. What ASRock did there is use it inbetween an AGP chipset and the CPU, to end up with properly implemented AGP alongside full 16-lane PCIE graphics. (The M1567 "southbridge" is in fact the M1689 AGP single-chip-set rebadged.)

All other solutions either have limited PCIE performance (like VIA's KT880pro P4 chipset, full 8x AGP but only 4x PCIE), or do some sort of pseudo-AGP off a PCI bus - which limits compatibility to ooooold cards that still can do "0x" AGP mode with 3.3V signalling.

 

[Peter]

ULi's drivers are on www.uli.com.tw or, due to the increasingly hostile looking takeover from NVidia, from www.nvidia.com

 

[curtisbouvier]

I just ordered the Asrock, should be on my doorstep tomorro morning hehe, I realized that it's amazing how I can get the last years worth of my money out of this radeon 9800 pro, and then later update to the X1900XT when they drop a little in price, and as well still be able to upgrade to an Athlon FX60 =].

i ordered 2GB of ballistix PC3200, (2-2-2-6)

So either way I should probably start seeing somthing a little faster than 2 frames a second when were whiping to Chromaggus in blackwing layer LOL.