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General discussion

Motherboard purchase

Mar 6, 2004 6:11AM PST

I'm looking for info on what is the best motherboard to buy for athlon processors, if anyone could help please do.

Discussion is locked

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It depends on........
Mar 6, 2004 10:07AM PST
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Re:Motherboard purchase
Mar 6, 2004 11:12PM PST

I just built a system and used a Shuttle AN 35N-400 with an AMD 2400+ XP. Six USB-2 ports, onboard sound, NIC, and other goodies. Very happy with it.

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Ooops, here's the site. . .
Mar 6, 2004 11:14PM PST
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Go to
Mar 7, 2004 1:44AM PST
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Re:Motherboard purchase
Mar 7, 2004 6:15PM PST

I have a Shuttle Spacewalker Apollo Board with VIA chipset and onboard sound and I've got smokin' benchmarks. From PC PitStop my lowest score was 82 percentile, several scores were 100 percentile and up to 3 times the average score for the same processor, video card & memory configuration. I highly recommend Shuttle for it's quality to cost ratio, but if you want to check out tests on boards with all the bells and whistles go to Tom'sHardware.com or throw a mobo number like A7V8X into Google search with the words Benchmark and Review. The testing sites usually compare about 4 mobos at a time.

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Re:Motherboard purchase
Mar 7, 2004 6:37PM PST

If you are going all the way up to a 64-bit processor, rather than a regular Athlon XP, just remember the NForce3 chipset chokes out at 600MHZ memory bandwidth, while the VIA goes all the way up to 800MHz. That is a noticable difference for the paired ECC hyperthreaded memory. For the regular Athlon XP that tops out at 400MHZ bandwidth, They say the performance between the 333MHz & 400MHZ chipsets end up nearly identical.
If you are going really inexpensive but not cheapo on performance, the old Athlon Thunderbird 1.4 GHZ is almost comparable to the Athlon XP 2700+.
You can probably pick that up already mounted on a board for not much over a hundred bucks.