New motherboard advice.

T

thomas234

Big Geek
You may have noticed I've been having problems with my computer recently, and I'm pretty sure from what I've seen it's the motherboard that's faulty. At present I have a Foxconn WinFast 760GXK8MC-S. I emailed Watford Electronics on Saturday, but as expected I've had no reply.

Anyway, I'm looking at new budget (no more than £35 ideally) motherboards. It must meet the following requirements:

  • Compatible with a socket 754 Athlon 64 3000 processor.
  • Compatible with my 184pin PC3200 512mb RAM.
  • SATA (I'm not bothered about SATA II).
  • LAN (100Mbps +)
  • Micro ATX (I think ATX would fit aswell, as it's a big case)

Also, I can't decide whether it's worth getting a board with PCI-e (although it would have to run off onboard graphics until after christmas at least), or sticking with AGP and use my existing Sapphire Radeon 9600XT. I don't play games very often, the most demanding one so far being Far Cry, and in the future I'll want to play NFS Carbon and NFS Most Wanted (but I can get Carbon on Ps2 I suppose). Do you think it's worth upgrading to PCI-e, or will I not notice a lot of difference?

The chipset - I'm not entirely sure what a chipset is, but I presume it's some of the components on the motherboard (eg onboard graphics). I've had a computer with a VIA chipset before and that had some issues with a certain USB modem. The broken motherboard I'm replacing has an SIS 760GX chipset and I've got no complaints about that. Is there a certain chipset manufacturer that's better than others (like nVidia?), or are they all as good?

Finally (this is turning out to be a lot longer than I expected), are there any brand of motherboards I should avoid, and any that stand out as being a lot better than others?

Thanks, Thomas
 
The chipset is the primary IC (or set of ICs--Integrated Circuit) on a motherboard that controls the buses, memory controller (except with the Athlon64 design), AGP, PCI, PCIe, and a list of other functions. It's arguably the most important chip, or set of chips, on a motherboard.

It would be beneficial to have PCI Express as companies are moving more and more of their production over to it. An AGP or PCIe connection of a video card doesn't make a whole lot of difference, however, PCIe video cards with the same GPU are cheaper, not to mention you'll have a wider range of options. Additionally, PCIe provides more juice through the slot than AGP. The only exception at this point would be if you're saving up for an entirely new build. At that point, I'd snag a cheap AGP S754 board to tide yourself over in the meantime. If not, bite the bullet and go PCIe.

The one cavet of onboard video is in most cases, the item siphons off some of your system RAM.

If you can hang on and bear with integrated video for a few months, I think you'll find sticking it out with a PCIe equipped motherboard is going to give you.

As far as recommoendations go, the following would work:

Asus K8N-VM
Gigabyte GA-K8N51GMF-RH (it is Socket 754, but eBuyer has the wrong picture for it).
 
Thanks! As it happens I was looking at the Gigabyte GA-K8N51GMF-RH and almost bought one from Ballicom house international, but postage was £10! Looking around on places like ciao e-buyer has fairy good customer service (although I doubt another motherboard will break!).

Thanks, Thomas
 
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