What mainboard to buy?

M

mustrum

Regular
I just got hold on some cash so i will upgrade my crappy SDRAM I845 Pentium 4 1.8.
I have a Radeon 9700 PRO and it's running on halfspeed with this slow RAM
It's a revision 11 9700 nonpro with 2.8 ns memory flashed to a 9700 pro with mufus bios.
I was thinking about gettin an I875 or I865 mainboard and a P4 2.6 FSB200. 512 or one GIG PC3200 RAM. (dual channel)

Wich board to get? I read about problems with older radeon 9700s and the canterwood/springdale boards.
Is there a board that runs 100% fine with revision 11 radeon 9700s?

Or better buy a AMD system with nforce2 chipsets?

Thanks in advance.
 
If you don't shy away from overclocking a little, then a nforce2 solution might be pretty attractive for you. Boards like the Abit NF7-S (or non-S) and Epox 8RDA3+ unlock the multiplier for you by default (so you can adjust it in BIOS), this gives you a great flexibility for tweaking core clock and FSB! Overall their performance and stability is pretty awesome too. Many people these days are getting a NF7 and a 2500+ Barton (FSB333) and set the FSB to 400 just to start things off. Or if you can get your hands on one of the 1700+ or 1800+ JIUHB DLT3Cs, those are highly overclockable even at their low default VCore of 1,5 (less heat, so with good cooling you can bring them up to 2400MHz or more, awesome price/performance). Board and CPU combined should costs less than a comparable P4 alone, so you can spend the rest of the cash on some other juicy extras (or take your g/f out to dinner)... ;)
 
Sounds interesting. There's something bothering me though.
The Athlon 64 will be out this Fall. To wait or not to wait?
It's not like my p4 1.8 ghz woulödn't do the job until then.
It's a i845 one with SDRAM wich is shitty but the radeon 9700 pro helps a bit and i still can play every game half-decently.

The SDRAM is a performance killer though.
 
also, many mainboard vendors are releasing bios tweaks that make the 865 boards to perform like the 875 boards. the only diff between the two is PAT, essentially it lowers the amount of time to get data from ram. so the 865 might be the way to go.

later,
 
Gollum said:
If you don't shy away from overclocking a little, then a nforce2 solution might be pretty attractive for you. Boards like the Abit NF7-S (or non-S) and Epox 8RDA3+ unlock the multiplier for you by default (so you can adjust it in BIOS), this gives you a great flexibility for tweaking core clock and FSB! Overall their performance and stability is pretty awesome too. Many people these days are getting a NF7 and a 2500+ Barton (FSB333) and set the FSB to 400 just to start things off. Or if you can get your hands on one of the 1700+ or 1800+ JIUHB DLT3Cs, those are highly overclockable even at their low default VCore of 1,5 (less heat, so with good cooling you can bring them up to 2400MHz or more, awesome price/performance). Board and CPU combined should costs less than a comparable P4 alone, so you can spend the rest of the cash on some other juicy extras (or take your g/f out to dinner)... ;)
Click to expand...

Although I'm a nForce/AMD owner myself (but primarily because of the AC3 encoding which is a blast in connection with my HiFi), the overclocking results with a P4 2,4 with 800Mhz FSB i've read about are incredible. (3,2Ghz and more IIRC) To be honest, if there were a soundcard with realtime AC3 encoding available, this would be my system of choice at the moment.
 
Go for the Abit IS7-E

Very cheap... get some good quality DDR400 RAM (two of).

Plug in your ATI Radeon 9700 and away you go.
 
If you want the latest and greatest and are willing to put your money where your mouth is, then a P4 platform is indeed the only solution, as none of the current XPs can really challenge the P4s at 3GHz and above (3200+ performs more like a P4 @ 2,8GHz). I personally always also consider my wallet though, and that tells me not to spend twice the money on ~equal performance. At least where I live the P4 2,4GHz costs about twice as much as an XP 2500+, and the good P4 motherboards are also quite a bit more expensive then good nforce2 ones like the nf7.

If you are lucky and your P4 2,4 indeed overclocks to 3,2GHz that additional investment may pay off since even though most 2500+ can also be overclocked decently (300+ or 3200+ levels are pretty common), it won't ever be quite as fast. But if the P4 doesn't clock that well - and as always there's just no guarantee for such an overclock, no matter how massive your cooling - then you just got less cash in yor pocket afterwards, without any real benefit. All IMO of course.
 
Maybe i didn't point it out good enough: The revision 1.1 radeon 9700 PRO
crashes with most I865/875 mobos.
I wanted to know if there's any mobo that is stable.
Or just wait for AMD athlon 64??
 
mustrum said:
Maybe i didn't point it out good enough: The revision 1.1 radeon 9700 PRO
crashes with most I865/875 mobos.
I wanted to know if there's any mobo that is stable.
Or just wait for AMD athlon 64??
Click to expand...

IMHO if the board revision fails with most i865 and i875 mobos then it's going to be similar with future AMD motherboards...

K-
 
I find it hard to believe that a revision 1.1 Radeon 9700/Pro crashes most i865/i875 chipsets.

If this is true then that is very odd. The previous faults with AGP8x, when the Radeon 9700 Pro first came out were not entirely the Radeon's fault and as such I find it hard to believe it is still happening.

I ahve had a Revision 1.1 Radeon 9700 Pro and it was absolutely fine on an i845 chipset as well as a NF2 chipset with full AGP 8x support on the latter chipset.
 
It still happenes and it is REAL. Go to rage3d.com and read the forums.
The manufacturers even point out in the manual that the mainboard can be unstable with a Radeon below revision 3.0.
I don't think trhis error has to be the same on future AMD boards.
It has to be intels fault because every other chipset on the market runs just fine with these cards.
Intel claims that the first Radeons were not 100% within the AGP 8X specifications. ATI blames Intel of course. :)
 
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