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Well basically in 3 weeeks time its my birthday, and im looking to treat myself to a new motherboard and a new cpu and give the ones that i have to my dad for a little sum of cash to help him build a new pc.
What i was thinking was an "nforce2 mobo and a barton 2500+". I will be clocking in this system so would it be worth the risk getting an cpu from a online-store and maybe getting lucky, or would it be better paying that little bit extra from "cpu city" and getting one which is "guaranteed" a good clocker.
Also which nf2 board shall i got for, i was looking at the "Asus A7N8X Deluxe nForce2" and the "Abit NF7-S v2.0 nForce2". Ive heard nothing but good things about both these boards, but ive dealt with asus before and have to admit they are very good. But i haven't yet dealt with Abit and don't know exactly what to expect.
Seing as ill be overclocking ill need to lock the "agp" frequency's they are not out of sync (well i think thats what you call them). Also i would like to use dual memory bandwith with my 2*256 sticks of pc2700 ram.
Baring in mind, i will use this pc for both gaming, work, multimedia, graphics etc. And i am hoping to clock the 2500+ well, also upgrading my gfx to a rad 9700/9800 pro depending how much cash i can come up with. I would like to get the best out of this system so i wont need to upgrade for at least another year.
So please help me out, cheers.
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TbredB (even XP1700+) tend to o/c as well as Barton, are very cheap and are 'only' 5% slower clock for clock. I'd still rec Barton as it does away with much of the problems assiciated with looking for a good TbredB (or any TbredB), that extra 5% on the Barton means you can have the same perf at 2.1ghz as a TbredB at 2.2ghz. Shop around and get it from where ever is cheapest (and a trustworthy place to shop) as it makes no diff when going TbredB or Barton.
It seems all nForce2 are great mobos and offer great o/c'ing options (inc locking PCI & AGP). Since your RAM is 'only' PC2700 you would be wise to keep to (or very close to) 333FSB, hence you'll want a mobo which can manipulate the 5th FID bit (needed for multipliers 13x and higher). Abit NF7-S v2.0 definitely does and I'd be heavily surprised if Asus' offering didn't too ... not so sure about other manu's but both Epox and Albatron are well known for good o/c'ing options. NF7-S is the preferred choice BUT do a search on here and you'll find it is far from ideal though a very good mobo (I'm very picky). You will definitely want to change the obnoxious NB fan on the mobo though, it is very low quality and LOUD. All nForce2 std and Ultra400 are Dual Channel, nForce2 400 & IGP are not (5% slower).
Will be a top system and shouldn't need upgrading for closer to 2 years (Athlon64 should be very cheap by then).
I think it's a win win situation really ... perhaps see what the bundles or price diffs are. I'd lean towards the Asus myself (A7N8X Deluxe for full MCP-T vs std MCP) ... things that let the Abit down is the awful NB fan, connector placement, incompatible BIOS' with the v1.x (not pointed out on the sites for a LONG time) and lack of an XP rating when you o/c ('Athlon at 2.2ghz' is very disatisfying vs XP3200+ for example).
