Trying to remember. Which SocketA MB was the best?

BladeVenom

Lifer
Jun 2, 2005
13,365
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That was probably the best chipset, and Abit's Nf7 series was also probably the best boards for it.
 

Kid Vicious

Member
Mar 6, 2005
90
0
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Asus A7N8X was also popular, and widely used with the Barton/Mobile Barton XP 3500 from what I can recall.
 
Dec 27, 2001
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A7N8X Deluxe. In addition to being a great overclocking board it also came with SoundStorm and had a nearly perfect layout. My bosses machine at work is still running that board and when we upgrade sometime soon, I intend to reclaim it.
 

imported_Moriturus

Junior Member
Aug 11, 2004
9
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Originally posted by: cubeless
k7s5a forever!!!

HAHA!! I had a couple. One caught on fire. They were prone to randomly re-setting the BIOS to default settings. I always thought that it was a good thing that the chipset heatsinks stayed so cool. When I took the heatsink off the chipset on the burnt K7S5A mobo, it turned out that it was glued on with cheap rubber cement. Nice decorative flourish, though; the heatsink's colors brought the rest of the mobo layout together . . .
 

imported_derekn

Junior Member
Feb 21, 2006
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I went a little crazy buying SocketA motherboards.

I owned 2 ECS k7s5a motherboards (2 different revisions). I also owned an Asus a7v8x. ALL 3 of those motherboards died eventually (within 3-6 months) and didn't last long. My first SocketA motherbard was a Tyan s2390b (VIAKT133a chipset). I had major problems with it but eventually became stable and I gave it to a friend (as far as I know it's still running).

I had the best SUCCESS with 2 Abit NF7 v2 motherboards and an Asus a7n8x deluxe rev 1.04. Those 3 motherboards are still working and running 24/7. I have an Asus a7v8x-x motherboard that I don't run full time. as I don't like how hot the KT400a chipset gets It's still working.



 

sjwaste

Diamond Member
Aug 2, 2000
8,757
12
81
nforce2 was the best for overclocking, as the VIA chipsets didn't allow for fixing the AGP/PCI clocks. If you increased FSB, up they went too.

I had a VIA board for my HTPC, but my 2500+ at stock speeds just was a little too underpowered for HD content, so I bought an ECS N2U400 off of Ebay and oc'ed at stock voltage to 3200+. It could go further, but this board doesnt allow vcore adjustments.

The NF7 is the best as far as I can see from archived reviews I googled. There's usually a few of them on Ebay, at a premium ($80 or so).
 

Allio

Golden Member
Jul 9, 2002
1,904
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The EPoX 8RDA+ was a great overclocker, but got hit really badly by the bad cap plague.
 

Zap

Elite Member
Oct 13, 1999
22,377
7
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Chipset was Nforce2 400 Ultra. One decent and really budget board was the Shuttle AN32N or something like that.