which motherboard

[borginspace]

i dont know if any one has asked this question before. but i think many people would like to know.
could some of you suggest a motherboard that would be best both for amd athlon xp or pentium4.
and could you also give your reasons for suggesting them.
thanx to anyone and everyone who responds
borginspace

 

[AkumaBao]

I can't recommend a good P4 board, but I can throw a opinion out about a good Socket A board though.

My $0.02:

Depending on the type of memory, I would point out two motherboards: the Iwill KA266+ & KK266+. The KA supports DDR, and the KK supports the SDRAM. Both have great stabilty, and built in 6.1 surround sound. You can also buy these with built in RAID controllers, (the models with the "-R" after them) supporting up to 8 hard drives. Most would say ASUS. Well if you look at my first rig, I had a KA266-R in it, and now I wish I still did. The ASUS is very unstable, and I'm not even overclocking it at all!!!!! The KA266 had no problems what so ever except for a compitbilty issue with ATI when it first came out, but other than that it was great. Great OC board if that is what you are intending to do with it, and the built-in sound I would pick over a SB Live! series sound card. (But not my Audigy ) Also, if you're not in a hurry to buy a mobo, the new Iwill XP333 will be out in about a week, and is probably going to be the strongest board available this year. Check out the stats of these boards here.

 

[carbonbased]

For an AthlonXP motherboard:

I would recommend a newer Via KT266A based motherboard. The KT266A motherboards are faster than the previous generation ones and some of them have some great features like RAID, USB 2.0, etc. There are many reviews around the web of the different boards including here at anandtech. I myself just got the brand new Asus A7V266-E w/raid and IMO it rules. It's fast, overclocks well, and it's stable.

carbonbased

 

[AkumaBao]

<< It's fast, overclocks well, and it's stable. >>



Carbon I respect your opinion, and you must be a lucky person to have an A7V that is stable. The one I'm using plus others had small instability problems, including a problem with being able to support 2 DDR chips w/o the newest BIOS. On the performance, I can see that the KT266 is suppose to be faster, but I didn't see an increase at all in any benchmark I used. This is probably a problem they fixed in a later board, but the A7V I can't give a positve response. The A7A was pretty good, but I still like the ability to configure the BIOS more in an Iwill, but that's just my opinion. No offense to you at all Carbonbased.