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Upcomming Purchase Help

Spacejunky

Junior Member
Well this will be my first system I am putting together in 2 years and wanted to get some ideas of a good motherboard to buy. What I want is a mostly gaming system. Somewhat highend, watercooled, all that jazz. But I am having problems finding good info on motherboards for the AMD processor. I am going to get a 2.2 to 2.5 then overclock it, and I want a 400Mhz buss speed. If anyone has any suggestions of ones to look at and ones to avoid, I would greatly appreciate the help.

Thank you.
 
The Nforce2 is pretty much the best AMD motherboard chipset right now. There are a number of motherboards that use that chip, including the popular Asus A7N8X and EPoX 8RDA(+). The 2500+ AthlonXP with Barton core should overclock fairly well. The Thoroughbred B core 1700+ and 1800+s are usually great overclockers, there's plenty of information about those and everything else in the Processor forum.
 
The deluxe adds:

more USB 2.0 ports
Soundstorm (useful if you have a 5.1 receiver)
firewire
SATA
dual lan ports

I consider the soundstorm to be a must-have if you have a receiver with 5.1 inputs or one that can decode a 5.1 signal. I also like having SATA, as it allows you to access more harddrives concurrently (if you have SATA drives and/or converters from parallel to serial ATA). Firewire is handy if you plan on getting (or own) an ipod or external firewire harddrive. It's up to you to decide if these features are worth the $12 price premium (at newegg). I think they are. 🙂

Also consider the NF7 and NF7-S. They're both excellent boards that have proven themselves to be top shelf when it comes to overclocking. I have the NF7-S and I love it.
 
One question I could not answer by reading the reviews on this ASUS board is does it support out of the box extra large Hard Drives (>137GB)?

I have WD 180GB 8Mb drive and would like to set it up as a main drive for the system.

Thanks in advance for the answer,

netscorer.
 
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