Looking for advice on motherboard upgrade??

[stu8080]

this supplier stocks this one at a rock bottom price (remember im on a tight budget... i already spend far too much on PC gear and i have a acceptable gaming rig which i will probably upgrade to an athlon 64 sometime next year)

Foxconn SiS mobo:
http://www.disking.co.uk/product_info.ph...d=45847223

has three PCI, as opposed to two for the ASRock boards ive seen, 400Mhz FSB, S/PDIF out and LAN. should be pretty capable with a 2500+ Barton and 512mb PC3200 RAM??? the chip cost me £40, this board is £30 + P&P.

[ShiningDragon]

Yeah, Foxconn is a good deal :-D Not the Turbo-Real-Giga-Ultra-Game Platform, but rocksolid. For this price the best you can get.

[stu8080]

Cool, im looking forward to getting some of the other features of GBPVR, avi files, visualisations etc.
Cheers all for the advice

[ddrawley]

I could not disagree more on the SIS and Uli chipsets.
The only two chipset manufacturers I have had minimal problems with over the last 10 years are NVidia and Intel.
The others have frequent stability, quality control, and general IRQ handling issues.

[stu8080]

that complicates things somewhat...

[ShiningDragon]

@ Intel i can agree, but even Intel had much quality-problems (ICH5 Southbridge sometimes burned down @ using USB !!!)

And NVIDIA? Ok, now i use a NVIDIA nForce 430, but the older ones are very bad. nForce 2 -> Bugs with Driversoftware (Data Corruption), bad PCI-Performance, often stability Problems by using more than 2 DIMM's. nForce 4 -> NCQ-Bug, SATA-Problems, defect Armor Firewall and so on...

Btw., NVIDIA will buy Uli.

@stu8080
If i had my Athlon XP2.500+ at the moment, i would buy the Foxconn.

And think about one thing: It's crazy to think, that a 30 Euro Mainboard could be the best of the best. Even NVIDIA's nForce 4 Premium Line (~200 Euro) is far away from beeing perfect.

NVIDIA, ATI and VIA Mainboards are primarly for gamer.

SiS is VERY robust and stable, Uli has some new good things :-D

[stu8080]

one thing is certain, anything would be an improvement on my 133mhz no name Via board at the moment carrying a Duron 1100!!

[ddrawley]

Hauppauge has reported several incompatibility problems on its site. For example, it is known that some non-Intel PCI controller chipsets on the motherboard, made by manufacturers such as SiS, VIA, UMC, ALi and OPTi, won't allow a TV tuner to access the graphics system without causing a system lockup.

http://www.pcbuyerbeware.co.uk/VideoProblems.htm


This is just one of many links I could provide. ALI is the former name of ULI.
NVidia is just plain smart to buy ULI. They can now deny ATI access to the south bridge ULI makes. ATI could not get one of their own working, and relied on ULI to get an ATI chipset system out the door. Recent reports show ATI is six months away from producing a properly working south bridge.

Most of the alternate chipset makers have focused on being cheaper, not better performance. Problems abound. I wish you good luck if you decide to go with them. I have been burned too many times to waste my money on them anymore.

My money goes to Intel and NVidia motherboard chipsets. They are not perfect, but competent.

[gEd]

Im looking to upgrade my current setup to a more capable processor, ive bought an Athlon XP 2500+ and am finding it hard to find out what motherboards would suit me.

It needs to be an nforce2 or greater so i can 'hopefully' get more functionality from my 350 (i still have a little faith left in it!) and mATX form, the more features it has the better, especially LAN and plenty of USB ports and firewire support.

So far these look the best options:
http://www.techstore.co.uk/browse.php?a=...neID=39145

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/..._uid=73806

All comments welcome!

I am using the ASUS A7N8X-VM that you linked to with
single 512mb ram
mobile Barton 2500
pvr-350
nova-t usb2

it all works pretty good now although i do have the occasional crash/hang (say once a week)

problems:

the usb ports cannot supply enough power to the nova-t and the usb wi-fi device. i sorted this by purchasing a powered hub off fleebay for £10

the big problem with this mobo is that the bios has no adjustable settings for FSB, multi, voltages etc. Thus with a mobile chip, i had to hack the settings by inserting pieces of wire into the cpu socket to get the correct voltage, fsb and multiplier. This is something that you will want to avoid so i would not recommend this board if you have the mobile cpu.

i had to remove the 2 x 512mb Dimms as they forced the FSb to run in dual channel mode at 200mhz (when you have an AGP graphics card installed) but this was very unreliable in my setup. hence I moved to a single stick of 512 which is JUST enough.

the on-board graphics chip produces a very bad tv image via the s-video output so i use a passively cooled ATI 9600pro graphics card instead.

I would probably plump for the MSI in the vain hope that it's bios is more flexible but if you have a non-mobile chip, the asus may work fine.

The PVR 350 is a great card but it's benefits (over say a much cheaper PVR150) when using gb-pvr are lost unless you use the dedicated video out; but then you can;t play dvd's or divx files without transcoding them on the fly...

the sound chip on the nforce 2 mobo is pretty good btw.

hth

[stu8080]

Seems like im stuck between a rock and a hard place, SiS might give me probs with my 350 and 150. Nvidea might cause probs with Ati Radeon graphics card?

Ddrawley
Am i right in thinking the lockups are caused by tv-card not being able to use onboard graphics? would this be an issue with my ATI 9200SE?

gED
Im using a desktop AMD, and dont intend to overclock as i want it to run as cool and quiet as possible, and i have a passive gfx card to handle tv-out which should be good enough.

Ive ordered the SiS as the Nforce2 board is unnavailable at the moment, i'll test it when i recieve it and if it starts to give me problems will return it asap and get my money back, and wait for the nforce2 board.

gED looking at this you should have a pretty similair setup to mine, do you still find there are things you cant do or does that rig run everything smoothly?