more (yes more) on motherboards

[musicfest]

hey, thanks for getting back to me with those posts..

about the moutherboard, would i be better off going for an Asus motherboard?

bit unsure there..
im pretty happy cause prices for pc seem to have dropped a bit with our GST introduced today (australia).

thanks for your help. most appreciated.. any further comments particularly with the motherboard would be really great.

thanks again

Bill

[bstaley]

In my experiences with motherboards, I would have to say Asus is the best with Abit and Tyan a close second. I'm sure you'll find people to argue this, but I've built a ton of machines and these boards seem to have the best combination of stability, performance, user documentation and www support.

[WayneM]

Hi Musicfest,

You're choice of PC setup seems to be very similar to what I had in mind for my own system (but I'm still unsure I am going to buy a 001 myself). From your website link I assume you are also a fellow Queenslander (Brisbane-ite?)

From all accounts and from I've read on the web the A-Bit BE6-2 is a fairly good choice for a BX motherboard. One thing you might want to consider with this board is that while it has 5 PCI slots only 4 of them can be used for bus master devices, the remaining slot only can only be used as a slave which can only be used by a limited number of cards which don't require an IRQ (I hope I got that all correct - its a bit of a steep learning curve for me). Anandtech did a review of various BX boards which can be found at http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1250&p=7 they also outlined the pro's and cons of the UDM66 chips used on each board. Toms hardware also did an article about overclocking with the BE6-2 at http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboa...503/index.html which is also interesting reading.

The only thing you might want to consider - the P3 @ 700MHz was designed to operate at 133MHz whereas the A-Bit board only officially supports 100MHz. So you could either underclock the P3 to 100MHz or overclock the board to 133MHz (not that I condone or recommend that kind of thing ;-)). The problem with the latter is that the AGP for the graphics card will be running outside of spec at 89MHz. If you're like me the Riva TNT2 card you mentioned in you shopping list will be the generic A$130 special as advertised by places like Sunlit and the Queensland Computer Group which may not be able to take out of spec frequency which the more expensive TNT2 cards can handle (if you do try this out please let me know of the result - I was curious to see if it will work).

To get around this you could either go for a PCI card such as a 3DFX 16MB Voodoo 3 2000 PCI which Sunlit has for A$209 or look at a Voodoo 3 3000 which passed Tom's Hardware tests as an overclocked AGP card. This review is at http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic...rclock-01.html

Of course the best way to run the P3 at 133MHz is to get a board which supports this but as the only ones available are either based on the Intel 810 or 820 chipset (with the dreaded RAMBUS) or the Via chipsets (which Digi doesn't recommend) the options are limited.

Sunlit or QCG tend to be about the cheapest prices in town if you are putting your own system together. The only other board you might want to consider is the ASUS CUBX which is also a BX and has been getting good reviews. Apparently it has 6 PCI which can all function with master device cards plus a pretty good UDMA66 controller. Its a bit more expensive than the Abit (some stores were quoting around $300 before the GST came in).

Sorry about the last minute response to your posts - I hope you had a chance to read this before you've bought your system and the advice is all academic! Best of luck with your system purchase. Could you please let us know how it goes with the 001.

Regards

WayneM

[Doc]

I'm using an Abit BE6 MB and have had trouble using the ATA66 bus for data. If you put your OS disk on the 66 bus and use the 33 bus for data, all should be OK Check out this thread http://www.digidesign.com/ubb/Forum34/HTML/000051.html
for more info on the Abit BE6

[B.Ray]

Things appear to be changing on the mobo front. Intel recently announced the release of their new i815E chip set. It supports 133MHz front side bus, PC133 and Ultra ATA100 (the new 100MB/s disk drive spec).

A few vendors are advertising them on their web sites: ABIT SE6, ASUS CUSL2 and Micro Star 815 Pro and they appear to be shipping.

I plan on trying one at the end of the year when I do my processor & RAM upgrade. No complaints with my current setup (it flys - and is very stable), I just want more power.

[bstaley]

I just read today that Abit is coming out with a new 440BX motherboard that is designed for overclocking. It also has ATA-100 RAID controller onboard! Frontside Bus speed up to 200mhz in 1mhz increments. Sounds pretty interesting.

[musicfest]

Doc, wonder if you could help me out more on the 33/66 Data/O.s thing. I don't really understand it.. isn't the 66 speed faster?

Really trying to figure out problems with the system locking up (refer to my new post)
using the Abit Rev-2 Be6 mb etc.

Any help would be most appreciated.
Bill Roebuck