A recurring nightmare on Ashton Gate Road

Faction

Faction

Proto-col
Messages
21,786
Reaction score
963
Location
Bristol
Hi all...

Due to extreme unfortunatness and untimely occurrencing, I am suddenly in urgent need of a new motherboard and CPU. I'm intending to go for an AMD 64 CPU (probably around 3300) and I'm wondering what you guys consider to be the best motherboard to go with it. I'm looking for stability and speed, alongside the usual facilities (AGP, at least 4 USB 2.0 ports, networking). I'm planning on spending around £200 in total, although depending on finances there may be more available.

Cheers!

Colin
 
AMD 64 Motherboards are all pretty much the same atm Colin, well having said that, a friend of myne has a MSI K8T Neo-fisr with a 3000 proc, and it really does kick ass :) takes PC3200 ram, and of course is 800Mhz FSB, I dont remeber how many USB ports its got, but I'm pretty sure its 4+ (well not many mobo'z with less these days!), of course the sound is pants, but itz ok for games (I suposed lol), also has the usual suspects, SATA support & G-Networkin :)

well I'd recomend it for sure, I get green everytime I see his puter switch on (almost does it itself!).....but I really hope you'll make a lil partition and put Linux64 on it so you can really get the most out of the pc ;) ~£60 btw
 
Continuum said:
ooooh nooo AGAIN? Colin what did you do?
Click to expand...

Colin has just had a bit of bad luck I think - He's trying to mix the last tune of our album and of course due to murphy's law his pc packs it in.. but don't worry viewers, he keeps his data on a separate drive *wink

we'll get there in the end.. it's all sounding pucka so far!! (*sneaky plug)

Andrew
 
Hi Colin,

May be an overkill I don't know what you need but the ABIT fatality series, are the muts nuts....
I take it your AMD 64 will be Socket 939!
All ready for Sata hard drives (which are blindingly quick and quite cheap) and PCI Express so fully Future Proof! But I think they have ditched the AGP....

Check out this page: http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/ABIT_Socket_939.html

The Abit AV8 3RD Eye VIA K8T800 Pro (Socket 939) Motherboard (MB-053-AB), has still got AGP, and looks good spec, not seen one working though...

Good Luck for getting your machine back, sounds like it has come at the wrong time for the VoC album, bad news...!
 
Yeah, the timing sucks. I was literally just about to bounce down the first final mix of the last track for Andrew's approval when the machine black-screened on me. It powers up but refuses to boot - no beep, no video BIOS, nothing... It was an AMD XP2400+ and I'd been overclocking it to 2600 since I got it maybe 18 months ago and I think it might just have given up the ghost, so I'm thinking if I've got to fix it I might as well upgrade at the same time!

Keep the advice coming people, I appreciate it. Possibly also going to upgrade my CPU cooling at the same time - I was thinking about this but any advice on effective and quiet CPU cooling is weclome.
 
I've read some really good stuff about those coolers, I personally think they'r talking crap when they say it out performs a water cooler, but I havent compared the two personally, and well they are supposed to have good performance anywayz :D

The Scythe Ninja Fanless Heatpipe CPU Cooler further down the page looks interesting, and could be really good if you have decent fan system in the case, think I'm gonna try that out myself infact :)
 
Colin OOOD said:
Possibly also going to upgrade my CPU cooling at the same time - I was thinking about this but any advice on effective and quiet CPU cooling is weclome.
Click to expand...

phone the bloke at quietpc.com
He'll sort you out and make sure you don't buy anything you don't need. I got a cpu cooler and gfx card heatsink and was well pleased with the results...

[edit] but of course you already knew that . Hmmph.
 
If you are using a seperate GFX card, then I'd change the cooling on that.

Nvidia and ATi reference cooling fans (particularly nvidia) are silly noisy.

Why not get rid of all those stupid fans? If you are feelign brave ... click

Oh yes, nearly forgot, most motherboards are very very similar, but for God's sake, get one which uses a heatsink to cool the northbridge, because as I found out to my cost, 40mm fans whine like a bitch. It is for this reason, that I recommend you do NOT buy a fatality board, as they are designed to be overclocked hard for gaming purposes, and come with two 40mm noise sources attatched to the back of the board. They are great boards, just not for studio use.
 
All this arsing about with fancy coolers that threaten to snap your motherboard in half... what a load of crap.

There is no substitute for physically removing your noisy machine from the vicinity of your working environment. Invest in some good quality, long VGA cables, long mouse and keyboard cables and put the noisy bastard in the room next door.

Or outside.

OK, maybe not outside.

But there really is no need to have it sitting where it gets in the way of your legs and your acoustics.
 
Thanks for the advice. I made sure when I built the PC in the first place that I bought a fanless graphics gard (128MB Radeon 9000 with 1 analog, 1 digital output). No motherboard I buy will ever have a fan built onto it. The Reserator system is impressive in many ways but is not suited to my needs for reasons of cost and space. I currently have this PSU and this CPU fan in this case.
 
then I'd go for the board at the bottom of this page, as it is the only one I can find that fulfills all you requirements.

Of course, you could buy a board with the 40mm northbridge fan, and then replace it with a heatsink, but this can be a hassle.
 
Warwick Bassmonkey said:
All this arsing about with fancy coolers that threaten to snap your motherboard in half... what a load of crap.

There is no substitute for physically removing your noisy machine from the vicinity of your working environment. Invest in some good quality, long VGA cables, long mouse and keyboard cables and put the noisy bastard in the room next door.

Or outside.

OK, maybe not outside.

But there really is no need to have it sitting where it gets in the way of your legs and your acoustics.
Click to expand...

Where it is it interferes neither with my legs or my acoustics as it is well out of ear-line in a very well-insulated case with lots of quiet cooling going on. And next door is my housemate's bedroom and I don't want to have to wake him up repeatedly at 3am because I'm burning a batch of CDs. Besides, long VGA cables are a recipe for screen fuzziness and ghosting.

My current thinking is this motherboard.
 
My current thinking is this motherboard.
Click to expand...

My current board is a GB board. (In fact I think it is the Intel equivalent of the same board part of the titan range) I have nothing but nice things to say about it. Mine came with a really good package as well (ie waaaaaay more fixtures then you need, clear manual and proper protective packaging), it is a dream to use, and dual bios is something that every board should have. Winner.
 
The nightmare has ended.

Turns out that the original upgraded CPU I bought was faulty and insisted it was a Mobile Athlon 2200 rather than an XP3200+ so i sent it back and got a refund. I've just bought another XP3200+ and this one is fine! It's running on the new motherboard (itself a much more recent version of my old one)I bought off eBay to replace the one I thought I trashed when the original upgraded CPU wasn't recognised (although it turns out that the old mobo is also fine!).

I'm doing a heat test at the moment with Cubase running the final VoC album track on full CPU-tilt; it's a really hot day, i've got my Zalman fan turned down to 'silent running' and the CPU temperature seems to be stable on 60 degrees...

I'm happy!
 
hooray colin.. can't wait to hear your mix of Slysis me.. don't forget to turn up the *cough* in Bakelite ;-)

Andrew
 

Thats good to hear Colin.:jump:
Everything’s coming up roses and daffodils.

 
geoffwiffen said:
The Abit AV8 3RD Eye VIA K8T800 Pro (Socket 939) Motherboard (MB-053-AB), has still got AGP, and looks good spec, not seen one working though....!
Click to expand...

Works like a dream in my PC

So much better than my old one.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top