Motherboard Advise Needed

maxpayne2409

*Split from a thread - new pc advise

coolness, cant wait, ive ordered some of my new stuff finally to go in my bloody amazing best case ever pictures dont do it justice believe me

i got some hdd fans (4 to be precise), a necessity with maxtor.. so im told personally had no overheating problems myself, which is amazing, Again so im told

Fan - http://www.dabs.com/uk/productView.htm?quicklinx=3028
PSU - http://www.dabs.com/uk/productView.htm?quicklinx=389V
GFX - http://www.dabs.com/uk/productView.htm?quicklinx=3MFP

now i just need to get myself a nice 64bit amd processor (are all 64bits dual core?) and a motherboard and im sorted for taking things to a newer level, incidently im having real trouble finding a motherboard to fit my needs, if anyone can help, i need/want one with

5-6 pci slots
x16 PCI-E compatibility
3-4 ddr ram slots (reminds me need to buy some of that)
nforce 3 or 4 chipset
socket 939

spudthedestroyer · **Posted:** Thu Aug 25, 2005 1:18 am **Post subject:**

lol, best case ever if you want some gimmicky butt ugly piece of crap. Sorry about that, but i'm seriously not liking the look myself, and it looks cramped inside the case which is the most important bit. I'd look at air flow and space over gimmicks and asthetics. I have a Eclipse62, now that's a quality case, probably about x2 as much as that case costs though but its got what you really need if you use your pc and update.

I'm sure its adequet as a case though, but its so not the best case I've seen by a long way.

If your case had good airflow, you'd only need one 120mm fan @ the front of the hdd. I have 2x 120mm fans, a silent cpu fan and a high quality PSU, which means the heat is very low and it really doesn't make any noise you can hear very loudly.

Big on the flashing lights i take it? :googley:

I can't think of anything more annoying an ugly myself, sure it looks cool for a minute or two, but its annoying and the flashing lights are there just to cover up the crappy/noisey standard base unit if you don't pay enough for the parts.

Personally, i'd get a silent fan, a way better psu (dabs value are crap, and i take it it doesn't have PCIExpress power cables and ATX2.0?) and a nvidia card. You'd be better off with a nvidia card, especially if your interested in windows64, since ati are pathetic when it comes to drivers. The nvidia benchmarks also beat the ATIs current crop.

You seem to be working backwards though, shouldn't you have chosen a CPU and a motherboard, then a quality fan, a GFX card, and then worry about cases and shit? That's kinda working backwards choosing a case before anything else! :lol:

DFI are a quality make for mainboards. nforce3 is way out of date. You only need 3 ram slots, more are a bonus.

5-6 pci slots?

What on earth do you have in it. Motherboards these day have as a bare minimum:
2 x NIC (one probably Gigabit ether)
~8x USB
~2x Firewire
ATA and SATA RAID
Quality sound device.

I can't think what other pci cards you need, wireless and that's about it. If you get SLI motherboard, then you have 2xPCI-E, it might be a good idea to have a further 2 smaller PCI-E, then you only need one or 2 PCI ports.

I hope you've not bought your psu, gfx card or fan, or you don't agree/care about those comments.

maxpayne2409 · **Posted:** Thu Aug 25, 2005 2:16 am **Post subject:**

Quote:

lol, best case ever if you want some gimmicky butt ugly piece of crap

if i wanted that i wouldve bought your case, after having googled your case i think ill just ignore all comments, the case you have looks much more cramped then the one i have by miles, remove the side panel and your case also looks like it should house a pentium 2

infact i didn't know you were an author spud

fileslasher · **Posted:** Thu Aug 25, 2005 7:03 pm **Post subject:**

god damn thats a nice screenshot

PC_Arcade · **Posted:** Thu Aug 25, 2005 7:33 pm **Post subject:**

I can see that getting used again....

maxpayne2409 · **Posted:** Thu Aug 25, 2005 9:03 pm **Post subject:**

hehe glad you like it made me laugh as i was doing it :lol:

spudthedestroyer · **Posted:** Mon Aug 29, 2005 10:00 am **Post subject:**

Quote:

after having googled your case i think ill just ignore all comments

Well you know what they say, ignorance is bliss :wink:

Come on, did you even google or is it just that i suggested it? I find its increasingly the latter these days :lol:

For example:

http://www.3dprofessor.com/review.asp?id=80

You see how those pci ports fill up the entire case? No? Thought not.

Quote:

The chassis can take both standard ATX mainboards and full Extended ATX Mainboards (Dual Xeon and Dual Opteron) with ease though in the instance of EATX mainboards cabling has to be carefully positioned and secured.

EATX are f*cking huge, loads of space. i think your google's broken.

As far as the graphics cards comments go, if your happy not upgrading to 64bit it doesn't that matter, however my comments are based on the fact Nvidia are clearly a better board manufacturer when it comes to drivers. ati are an absolute farce when it comes to linux drivers, I'm sure you can dig a linux user up to "google" for this confirmation you'll find it. It took ATI nearly a year to make 64bit drivers, and if you 'google' for a win64 user, once again, he'll tell you its wank. Given this, and your interest in a 64bit processor it might be an idea to 'google' a bit more. The short period when ATI was king has unfortunately passed, its kind of a locked horn battle, but with ATI sluggish to support new operating systems, and doing such a crap job at that (i mean linux is a very old os, and they still don't give it any attention), its a choice that needs a bit of thought about.

ps. if you don't like feedback, which is what you asked for then at least don't make some "looks cramped" google crap up. I didn't mean to insult your choice because it sounds like your taking it personally, but i don't want to deceive you into thinking i would have made any of those hardware choices at this point in time in time.
Speaking as an aside, where on earth did you come up with that cramped crap btw?

Its really impressive, infact if you even google for that, the nearest you get is talk about the mitsubishi rally car :lol:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=eclips ... B:official
What did you search for?

spudthedestroyer · **Posted:** Mon Aug 29, 2005 10:14 am **Post subject:**

or if you what some first hand pictures with a athlon64 board in and a huge fan and heat sink i can take some photos of the case next a server tower to show you? I have a Chieftec case sat next to it. Chieftec make those rather nice chasis cases too, but there's better ones on the market obviously. But the price for them is a lot cheaper and its one of the best in its price range too.

No flashing sirens or fog horns though :wacky:

maxpayne2409 · **Posted:** Mon Aug 29, 2005 2:17 pm **Post subject:**

actually i did google it and found a shot of it from a sort of front/side view and it looked really really cramped from what i saw

im not taking it personally, i appreciate the feedback but it was more the way you put it across that your opinion is the correct one and no1 elses was valid that got my feckles up :lol:

although i still cant find a gigabyte board (the only make to buy) with nfroce 4 etc etc, stupid dabs with they're stock picture of 1 motherboard that they use for every item, how are you supposed to make an informed decision on the specs alone (which aren't written very clearly either)

spudthedestroyer · **Posted:** Mon Aug 29, 2005 3:05 pm **Post subject:**

well if you want me to deceive you and tell you i'd buy any of those particular choices i can do, its your money, if you don't want advice on making the best pc it doesn't really mean that much to you. Enjoy the flashing fan lights everything, as i said its adequet as is a case.

I was going to post some advice on other hardware choices at first, but i hesitated because i'm not sure you even want someone to tell you why they think the choices aren't very good. Screw it though, here's what i was going to post originally here:

Quote:

hmmm, not sure how they could have taken a shot to do that, but you'll have to take my word that they must have gone out of their way to deceive you, its quite literally very wide and the airflow is perfectly placed, you can at least see its rather large from the that shot? It even has a channel so that the cpu fan blows air out to a 120mm fan. Keeps everything extremely cold which means you can get larger and slower fans. You've also got the tray that slides out and the cabinet is extremely light and on wheels, so it makes it perfect for opening up the case. Infact speaking of which ever panel comes off and you have a seperate compartment for the psu which means its seperate and cool, if your not into pcs or take them apart that doesn't mean much of course.

Its plain black though, quite big and has no flashing lights or anything silly like that. it has one bright blue power light like the ones on the fans on that 'best case ever', but i have to cover it up when i watch something on my pc, pisses me off :lol:

Which seems to be a trend with the lights, the look cool aslong as your buying a piece of furniture, its like this stuff:
http://forum.dead-donkey.com/viewtopic. ... highlight=
:lol:

As for your adversions to my comments, opinion is opinion, but i'm not going to delude/deceive or be diplomatic about it at the same time, i never have or will. Its paramount to lying, i don't know why people should expect it. i really would not ever buy any of that gimmicky stuff like case lights, or choose a product without reading reviews on the pros and cons on every single bit of kit and check more than one shop. Maybe that's because i'm a fagin with my money, but if its not one of the best for the buck, its not worth it for me. I'm honestly trying to make sure its not pot luck window shopping, and there's been a bit of thought behind the hardware choices, and if i'm wrong or you don't agree, i'd like something that's going to change my mind, which i rarely get, so it helps my hardware choices. We are talking about rather expensive products.

There's a thread somewhere with justificaiton for some hardware choices i made on my last machine if you want some opinion on products although its a bit old now. if you need advice there's some there.

As for your motherboard, best idea I'd recommend is forget dabs if it doesn't have the product you want, its unfortunate; choose the board then find a site that stocks them. kelkoo or another price search are rather good at this, infact you might find the odd product cheaper. The gigabyte 'only make to buy' is a vast crock btw, there's loads of boards that are well worth buying, gigabyte do lots of good ones and lots of terrible ones, particularly if you want the performance first and foremost its all down to the specific products in the market.

Consider one of these if your spending the cash, they do things like bios backup, hardware firewall, etc. They are a geek mainboard maker:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Socket_939.html
The DFI lanparty is a very good product, highquality. They also have all those flashing lights and stuff like that if you want them since its a product for custom pcs. If you need cutting edge tech though, they've been out for a while.

Gigabyte do some decent enough boards, there's some here if dabs is pissing you off, they are probably a bit more money but overclockers tends to give you more info if your doing quick comparisons before reviews (of course reading advertising material isn't the best way to get a view of how good the board is):
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/ ... t_939.html

Epox are worth a look, another overclocking board which means they're a better build:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/ ... t_939.html

I wouldn't shop at overclockers sometimes its more expensive, but use the details then google for stores stocking it in the uk

As for ATI vs Nvidia. if your buying something now, a top end to mid end card. nvidia has the best high/mid end card, so if you haven't bought one yet, at least do a bit of research and see if ati is the brand you really want. There's a list of hardware review sites somewhere. I don't know if this is based on people like me saying ati was far better, this was some time ago and the markets unfortunately turned round again.

I think this sums it now, since you didn't like me putting it bluntly on the graphics card, i'll quote a top hit of a review from google:

Quote:

No matter how you cut it, NVIDA has hands-down taken the last two matches in the ultra high-end enthusiast and mid-level enthusiast computer graphics game with their 7800 GTX and GT cards, respectively. If you are a gamer interested in the highest levels of game play performance and image quality, but don?t want to break the bank doing it, you have just found your video card. The only question remaining is whether ATI is secretly brandishing a hidden rock ready to pound NVIDIA's scissors, or if ATI are simply going to forfeit the final round in this game.

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=ODAzLDE0

They all have the same gist to it and its ~?150 of your money.

I notice that you are buying a low end card though, i think its about even steven except for the driver issue of course. For Rome Total War you might want to look at a bit more cash on the card, Rome wasn't conquered on a ati radeon 9000... not looking good anyway :lol:

Ignore it if you choose, your money, but if you think its bad advise i'd like to know better alternatives at least.
:mrgreen:

maxpayne2409 · **Posted:** Mon Aug 29, 2005 4:00 pm **Post subject:**

well while i do want a good machine im also limited to how much cash i have to spend on it all (working at argos isn't the glamourous well paid job it's portrayed to be :lol:

) so i have ot get the best stuff available for the cash i have, i dont fancy spending over ?1000 on a computer when i also need to get a car

when i bought my case i actually went round a lot of shops, and sites to see what i could find and read reviews and checked things out

the one i got actually also has a seperate space for the psu, a tray to take out for the motherboard, removable mounting trays for 5-6 hdds, removable trays for 2 fdd, and 5-6 removeable mounting trays for cd/dvd drives which to be honest i think is a pretty nice idea as it saves having to really reach into the nether realms of your pc

i used to use overclockers.co.uk a fair bit but ive not been there in a long time, ive been a long time nvidia user, but recently ive been seeing lots of ati's thrashing nvidia on friends computers and such, so i thought id give ati a try for a change, the proof as they say will be in the gaming pudding

still gotta buy the mobo, ram and processor, im definately gonna get a 64bit amd processor tho, but im not installing windows 64bit until more programs support it, but at least when they do i will have the tech to support

spudthedestroyer · **Posted:** Mon Aug 29, 2005 4:06 pm **Post subject:**

i spent a shit load on a machine, over a grand, but that was the first time i'd ever done that and was soley because i choose a Athlon64 4000+. The machine works like a cool son of a bitch.

Athlon64 3400+ with 1mb is a sound choice, i was going to get it until i changed my mind and got the beast of a 4000+
The motherboard, I still think the DFI Lanparty has all the stuff you need although its a bit more money than gigabyte alternatives., except for the excessive amount of pci ports, are you actually using them? It has SLI which is two PCI-E large, 3 small PCI-E and two pci iirc. Gigabit ether, 100mbps lan, hardware firewall, firewire, usb, all that jazz.

RAM, PCA recommend crucial, its worked great so so do i. Get it direct from crucial.com . Just enter the motherboard you want then get some DDR333

maxpayne2409 · **Posted:** Mon Aug 29, 2005 6:01 pm **Post subject:**

spudthedestroyer wrote:

i spent a shit load on a machine, over a grand, but that was the first time i'd ever done that and was soley because i choose a Athlon64 4000+. The machine works like a cool son of a bitch.

Athlon64 3400+ with 1mb is a sound choice, i was going to get it until i changed my mind and got the beast of a 4000+
The motherboard, I still think the DFI Lanparty has all the stuff you need although its a bit more money than gigabyte alternatives., except for the excessive amount of pci ports, are you actually using them? It has SLI which is two PCI-E large, 3 small PCI-E and two pci iirc. Gigabit ether, 100mbps lan, hardware firewall, firewire, usb, all that jazz.

RAM, PCA recommend crucial, its worked great so so do i. Get it direct from crucial.com . Just enter the motherboard you want then get some DDR333

yeah i wouldnt get any ram but crucial

motherboards come with hardware firewalls now?

ive been out the game too long

do the dfi boards have all the stuff i need and raid tho? (i thought raid came as standard these days)

spudthedestroyer · **Posted:** Mon Aug 29, 2005 6:16 pm **Post subject:**

actually twinmos is normally better quality but its the price and effort extra, crucial has its business model setup right.

DFI motherboards do, infact its nvidia nforce 4 provided i think so a few of them may do. Its on the chip, blocks all the stuff you need. I have anti-hacker mode on, but i let the router's firewall handle most of the stuff. So i don't run any firewall software at all on it, just avg virus scanner.

I would be amazed if you can find a 939 board without RAID, the DFI I have is SATAII compatible with, SATA RAID, and IDE RAID. I have two sata drives in raid 0. Works well.

Only "problem" with the DFI was the RAM wasn't detected as crucial claimed it was so i set the setting to what it should be. Doesn't increase the heat so i don't know why it was a setting below in some cases. you can run the smartguardian software and run the southbridge fan speeds low and there's no real noise.

In real term values, I have a Geforce 6800 GT (older card) now, AMD 4000+, DFI Lanparty nF4 SLI-D, 1GB of decent crucial ram, and 2 x wd sata drives, i play Rome: Total War on 1600x1200, with 2x AA and all the settings on highest or one below, slow down only occurs in 1000+ vs 1000+ troops and if its in high speed mode only, otherwise fps is very high. There is slow down when there's a huge city with several thousand troops (well rome only really). This is because its in 1600x1200 though bearing in mind, on a lower setting it has no problem.

in terms of most impact on games:
CPU > GFX > Motherboard > RAM (amount/specs)
in terms of impact on just running the machine:
CPU > Motherboard > RAM (amount/specs) > GFX

Thats why i would skimp on the none core components, and make sure you choose the best cpu and motherboard for your needs. If your motherboard is a bottleneck it slows everything down, ram is multitasking and size, and gfx card is solely for gaming when it needs a lot of money spent on it.

Athlon 3400+ is probably surpassed now, but make sure you check the specs for the amount of cache it has, 1mb is greatly better than 512kb.

barry

maxpayne2409 wrote:

5-6 pci slots
x16 PCI-E compatibility
3-4 ddr ram slots (reminds me need to buy some of that)
nforce 3 or 4 chipset
socket 939

My two cents(euro of course)

nForce 3 is only AGP. nForce 4 is PCI-E, so it's nForce 4 for you.

5-6 PCI? No, not an option on any PCI-E board. Most is 2 or 3 as there'll also be two PCI-E 1x lanes, or another 16x for SLI boards. I'd suggest the MSI K8N Neo 4 series, but the DFI's also have an excellent reputation. Most Athlon 64's are single core. But all AMD dual core's are 64bit.

Currently I'm on
Athlon 64 X2 4400+ (twin 2.2GHz cores with 1Meg of cache.)
2Gb of RAM (Corsair XMS)
MSI K8N Neo 2 Platinum (AGP)
MSI Geforce 6800(AGP)
400GB striped RAID array.

maxpayne2409 · **Posted:** Mon Aug 29, 2005 8:26 pm **Post subject:**

how come theres no pci-e mobos with more pci slots? just out of curiosity

well i use my pc mostly for gaming and video encoding (although im keeping my old (current) computer to encode on so it can do it all in the background and not ruin the gaming experience) so in theory thats 1 less pci slot i need in this i guess, but saying that my current computers only got a 32meg riva tnt2 in it after my geforce FX 5600 256meg melted :cry:

so i dont know how that will effect capping (never capped from tv/vhs before)

so really my new comp will mostly be for gaming i regret to say it spud but i took a look at dfi.com and there are some nice motherboards on there

/me eats humble yorkshire pudding

incidently what would this read like to you

Quote:

? 1 PCI Express x16 ? 2 PCI Express x1 ? 3 PCI

would that say it has 1 pci-e x16 and 2 pci-e x1 = 3pci slots, or would it say 3 pci-e and 3 normal pci slots?

also is it just dfi that have the ram slots running along the top rather then down the side? coz i like the concept behind that

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products ... _uid=92676

also about the inchip firewall. is it any good? and would it mean i dont ahve to use sygay firewall (which i hate with a passion)

also whats all this venice/barton/opteron stuff about? is it jsut different chip names? (ive been out of the whole computer tech game for about 6months-year since leaving college

barry · **Posted:** Mon Aug 29, 2005 8:47 pm **Post subject:**

maxpayne2409 wrote:

how come theres no pci-e mobos with more pci slots? just out of curiosity

Simply not enough space.

Quote:

incidently what would this read like to you

Quote:

? 1 PCI Express x16 ? 2 PCI Express x1 ? 3 PCI

would that say it has 1 pci-e x16 and 2 pci-e x1 = 3pci slots, or would it say 3 pci-e and 3 normal pci slots?

It's on 16x lane PCI-E, 2 1x lane PCI-E and 3x old fashioned PCI slots. Remember that more lanes in PCI-E tends to mean a bigger slot.

Quote:

also about the inchip firewall. is it any good? and would it mean i dont ahve to use sygay firewall (which i hate with a passion)

Don't know, use firewall in my router.

Quote:

also whats all this venice/barton/opteron stuff about? is it jsut different chip names? (ive been out of the whole computer tech game for about 6months-year since leaving college

Venice and San Diego are the two current single core chips, with 1/2 meg of cache and 1 meg respectively. Both are 90nm, better memory controllers, and SSE3 extensions.

Barton is the last revision of the Athlon XP's and is obsolete and no longer manufactured. And therefore irrelevent.

Opteron is the server version of the Athlon 64, coming in both single and dual core forms, they are also multiprocessor capable.

barry · **Posted:** Mon Aug 29, 2005 8:53 pm **Post subject:**

spudthedestroyer wrote:

Just enter the motherboard you want then get some DDR333

Er what? DDR333? Why would you do that to him?

maxpayne2409 · **Posted:** Mon Aug 29, 2005 9:13 pm **Post subject:**

barry wrote:

spudthedestroyer wrote:

Just enter the motherboard you want then get some DDR333

Er what? DDR333? Why would you do that to him?

isnt 3200 out now or something?

barry · **Posted:** Tue Aug 30, 2005 5:32 am **Post subject:**

maxpayne2409 wrote:

barry wrote:

spudthedestroyer wrote:

Just enter the motherboard you want then get some DDR333

Er what? DDR333? Why would you do that to him?

isnt 3200 out now or something?

Been out for some time, hence my confusion.

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