help me choose a mobo please

asktoby · Post by **asktoby** » Tue Apr 08, 2003 10:45 am

Hello

I am having nothing but BSODs with my cheap ECS Elite motherboard. Hopefully someone here can recommend a solid motherboard that fulfills these simple criteria:

Socket A (i.e. for athlonXP2200)
DDR memory
Onboard RAID-0
Onboard Ethernet would be nice but not essential.

Many thanks

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: asktoby on 2003-04-08 11:46 ]</font>

Post by **garyb** » Tue Apr 08, 2003 11:40 am

a good quality board with the n-force chipset is the choice.why raid?it's probably unneeded and will only use resources...

asktoby · Post by **asktoby** » Tue Apr 08, 2003 3:33 pm

RAID because RAID-0 has disk access that is supposed to be twice as fast as a single IDE disk. I figure this will reduce boot-times, app loading times, large sample loading times, so on and so forth... I also already have two identical IDE hard disks.

asktoby · Post by **asktoby** » Wed Apr 09, 2003 10:45 am

Two boards by Asus:
A7V8X = the Via chipset
A7N8X = the NForce2 chipset

You say:

a good quality board with the n-force chipset is the choice.

I'm willing to not have RAID, and I notice that there's good praise about the A7V8X in this thread:

http://www.planetz.com/forums/viewtopic ... 9&forum=19

With respect to the NForce2 option, in this thread:
http://www.planetz.com/forums/viewtopic ... 6&forum=19
HouseForum says:

"The A7n8x with nforce2 chipset doesn't work well with CW cards. With a pulsar only 3 Masterverbs can be open."

Consequently, I am leaning towards the VIA model A7V8X, despite your advice.

Any opinions on the matter would be warmly accepted - I've already made one motherboard mistake and I want to get it right this time!!

Toby

Post by **garyb** » Wed Apr 09, 2003 11:20 am

someone got 14 masterverbs with an nforce board.that's pretty good.from what i hear the early versions with the old bios are not good but the latest bios works fantastic.there is certainly plenty of bandwidth......the asus mobo is a good choice.

ide works perfectly for me.i regularly use 30+ tracks with no problems and no hiccups(full length tracks not little fragments).as i understand it,the faster raid configs have more chance for data loss....save raid for servers.my computer is so reliable,i often save stuff only when i finish working with it.("a bad habit",i was just thinking the other night,but i've never lost anything vital,thank God...)

personally,having started with a pulsar1(v1.2 or so)w/amd and via i would advise against it,but i would say that it will work.(probably not the best though)