what are some decent socket A mobos?

[MDE]

Originally posted by: charles555
OK, I am not up on Shuttle's offerings.


Stay away from Asus because they release some VERY buggy products. Take a look at all the SATA problems and their lack of support/fixes for it with new BIOS updates in their Flagship model A8N. And I have an old TV tuner card that screws up colors. I have never heard anything great about their product. Also, their A8N doesn't overclock well at all.

Yeah, because Athlon XP and Athlon 64 boards are exactly the same thing, nForce2, nForce4 same thing different numbers.

:roll:

Everyone had SATA problems early on, mostly user error (or crappy floppy drives). As for your TV card, it's old. Old things break, you upgrade and get snazzy new stuff.

I've used both the NF7-S 2.0 and A7N8X Deluxe and they're both solid boards, but I prefer the Abit.

 

[Interitus]

Another vote for the NF7-S 2.0. Awesome board, only getting rid of mine because i went to A64.

P.S. (shameless plug) see my sig below

 

[Martyuk39]

Asus v Abit -

I've made about 10 Asus-based systems using either the A7N8X or the K8V/KSE 64-bit model. All work fine. The first one took me 16 hours to build, basically because it was the first time in ages I'd built a system and in the interim period I had clearly forgotten how to read instructions. Now I have re-acquired that skill I get from opening the boxes to POST in about 25 minutes.

Abit - I've tried two NF-7s - not a huge sample I know, but enough to sway me. Both of them had to be RMA'd. And after the second one I just switched back to Asus.
Martin

PS - having said all that, I did manage to exchange a few emails about a mobo with an Abit representative, whereupon we concluded that the mobo we were talking about was crocked and I should RMA it. I have tried to communicate with Asus once or twice and I get the Chinese English messages in return, Whilst I respect the fact that their English is far better than my Chinese I've been unable to have any sort of dialogue with anyone from Asus

 

[Malladine]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
The Shuttle AN35N Ultra is a more budget-oriented nForce2 motherboard with a good reputation. It has basic onboard audio (you can always disable onboard audio, though), no Firewire.

:thumbsup:
I can also vouch for the Asus A7N8X rev2.0

 

[WT]

Mech, nice noob guide ! I've bookmarked it to send to some of my friends who feel daring enough to try and build a PC without consulting with me ! Excellent work and very thorough.

As stated, if you want the cheapest reliable board, its the Shuttle hands down. I myself want a better upgrade path, so I'm looking at picking up the Asrock K7Upgrade 880 found here

Once the Athlon XP chip becomes too slow, I pick up the S754 riser card and drop in my current AMD64 cpu for a nice upgrade and no board swap needed. There is also an S939 riser card being developed for this board too.

 

[Malladine]

Originally posted by: WT
Mech, nice noob guide ! I've bookmarked it to send to some of my friends who feel daring enough to try and build a PC without consulting with me ! Excellent work and very thorough.

As stated, if you want the cheapest reliable board, its the Shuttle hands down. I myself want a better upgrade path, so I'm looking at picking up the Asrock K7Upgrade 880 found here

Once the Athlon XP chip becomes too slow, I pick up the S754 riser card and drop in my current AMD64 cpu for a nice upgrade and no board swap needed. There is also an S939 riser card being developed for this board too.

:beer: for the floyd sig man

And on those 939 risers - any info on Asus providing that for their A7N8X boards?

 

[Quentin]

Originally posted by: charles555
OK, I am not up on Shuttle's offerings.


Stay away from Asus because they release some VERY buggy products. Take a look at all the SATA problems and their lack of support/fixes for it with new BIOS updates in their Flagship model A8N. And I have an old TV tuner card that screws up colors. I have never heard anything great about their product. Also, their A8N doesn't overclock well at all.

So you've never owned an ASUS motherboard yet say stay away?

ASUS sells a lot of boards so you're bound to see more complaints than with less popular products. Also you can be fairly certain that over 90% of the time there was no hardware failure - instead it's driver problems or user error.

 

[Quentin]

Originally posted by: miketheidiot

Originally posted by: Quentin

Originally posted by: charles555
Please, nobody, get anal: I would stay away from ASUS...

Ok you threw in your bomb and ran away. Now how about explaining "why?"

i've heard about bad caps, and i believe that was a concern of the op.

Guess I'm the designated ASUS fanboy today but fair's fair. Bad capacitors have turned up in lots of products and lots of brand names. Look at all the DVD players of 2002-2003 that ended up with bulging caps! And Epox had a lot of trouble with bad caps in their motherboards. I don't think ASUS has any more problems here than the rest of the industry and hopefully these defective Chinese knockoff caps have been purged from the supply lines by now!

I'm not saying to buy only ASUS - there are lots of options and lots of good choices. But I do own ASUS boards and they are good.

 

[WT]

Malladine, to the best of my knowledge, Asrock is the only vendor offering this oddball board which supports the Athlon XP line, and the S754 processors via an add on riser card. I swear I saw the S939 card on the Asrock website last week but I just looked now and I can't seem to dig it up. Here's an OC Workbench article on the board

I bought one for a customer and found it to be a nice setup and easy to work with. The only drawback is the odd dual AGP slot configuration which requires you read the stickers on each slot (not really that difficult, is it ??)

Not to sway off topic, as this is what I would like to use for my setup, so to each their own, but I figure if the riser card is fairly cheap (supply and demand, kids .. it might cost near as much as the damn board!!) this would make a VERY easy upgrade to an AMD 64 cpu. I have an S754 3000+, so if I'd buy a 3400+ then the 3000+ now has a home without requiring me to buy another board !

 

[DKlein]

I <3 NF7-S. I dread the day that I will have to buy a new motherboard... This thing has put up with a lot of my crap over the years. It has survived much overclocking, a poor PSU, a whole new system, and 3 processors (1 phased out and the other fried). I had to buy it when my ASUS A7V333 had to be RMAd for the second time (ever spent 3 weeks waiting for your motherboard to get fixed?), and haven't looked back since. Granted the A7V333 isn't exactly the greatest of the socket A boards from ASUS, so don't think this is anti-ASUS either.