Decisions, decisions

[payniel]

I am upgrading my entire system from my old K7S5A to a new mother board wiht new ram and all and am havign trouble deciding which motherboard to get. All of these are within my price range, and i would just like to hear some suggestions and opinions of which board to get. I am looking at the DFI NFII Ultra Revision B(the new lan party), the Asus A7N8X Deluxe, and the Albatron KX18D Pro II, and then any other suggestion you all might have.

[Howard]

The A7N8X Deluxe will certainly be the most high-quality board out of that little lot

[payniel]

I have been hearing alot of stuff about the Abit NF7-S, would that also be a good choice?

[Howard]

I love my NF7-S more than life itself

It's a fantastic board. /me hugs teh Abit

But yeah consider the Abit, Asus and the DFI one. I'm hearing a lot about it lately. Seems fairly well regarded. I'd go for the Abit or Asus though personally. It's up to you to decide which, bearing in mind the Asus is a little bit more expensive and the NF7-S has slightly better overclocking potential.

I also went from a K7S5A to my Abit and it was a wonderful decision

[payniel]

Yeah, my bro just got the NF7-S and he likes it. I noticed you didnt say anythign about the Albatron board, i read some stuff it runs pretty good too. But of those boards, which runs the fastest For gaming?

[Howard]

I doubt there's much in it for gaming. I'd just go for the board made by the most reputable manufacturers (Abit, Asus) tbh

How much is the Albatron board?

[payniel]

The Albatron board is priced at 98USD$ and its got a kool Royal Blue PCB too.

[Galant]

http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/motherboards.x

This next one I recommend, if you scroll to the bottom you can link to the other pages of the article.

http://www20.tomshardware.com/mother...ra_400-33.html

[payniel]

i've read that reveiw from THG and what mainboard do you recommend, cause the top link is a long list of mobo's.

[Galant]

Well, I've heard a lot about the Abit NF7-S, but I wasn't convinced. Apparently it's a good board, especially for OCing, but apart from here, not many rated the board, I'd heard it had a poor layout and I get the feeling like it's a case of people all going for the same thing and not knowing what else is around. I'm sure it's a good board, but I decided to try something else.

The Asus was one I almost bought, and seems to be very good. A touch more expensive. In the end I went for an
MSI K7N2 Delta ILSR. I only of one other guy on here having one. There were no major reasons for my choosing it over the Asus, but a number of sites recommended it, and MSI has apparently been very reputable in the past.

I'm no expert at all. Just go take a look at some links around here! This has been my first build, and in the end I just felt better about the MSI.

I've also heard a lot about some of DFI's board, but I didn't look into them too much as the price tags were too high.

[SilentDeath]

currently, me, my mum and my dad own/use four mobos, 2 of them are nf7-s (mine and my brothers) while the k7s5as are in my parents machines. tbh i do PREFER the k7s5a, they are the easyest board to set up and are basicly what a top board like nf7-s is, the only difference being sata, great sound, lan, ermm... only other thing is performace.
nf2 boards take time to get right, first u NEED a heatsink on the south bridge to stop the crackly sound, then you need the bios updates, you cant use the bundled monotoring soft without fear that it will stop your cpu fan (this happened a few times to me!)

there is however, nothing wrong with the layout, exept maybe two things, the first being the location of the vdd voltage regulators, just underneath the agp slot, how the hell am i going to do a volt mod with a 9700 in the slot, and i cant remove it either as watercooling would make a nice mess! the vcore regulators are also in bad place right at the back, though i manahged to do that without taking my cpu and nb blocks out

[payniel]

I didnt even bother to even look into the MSi board because of a very bad experience my famly had with a KT333 board that was from MSI. THe motherboard wouldnt run and AMD 1800 at its specified speed, instead it ran it at around 800mhz and the board would jsut stop working while it was lookign for a boot record on the harddrives about 70% of the time. I got that settled out and it ran at all the right speeds but it was way crappy performance and was surpassed in ability by the board i'm using now.

Seeign as the Albatron board is brand new not many of you have had any experience, but i think that might be the one i'm getting, because of price, color and the coolness factor of the system i'm building with its color, but i'm not sure yet, ohh and in some synthetic benchmarks, the ALbatron board scored in the top 3 or 4 Nforce 2 boards, abd they tested about 10, top of the line boards.

[Apex]

get the dfi for the sheer amout of stuff you get with it and the fact that clocks just has well compared to the others

[payniel]

Yeah, i know about that, And it is either the first or the second choice.

[SilentDeath]

i htink yoru looking at the wrong thing tbh.
VIA are teh evil and you should aviod. when chosing a mobo the most important thing is chipset and nf2 is a very good one, so is sis735 (for stability). the only way a manuf can make a board rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishe is by cutting too many corners using cheap components, or by bad bioses basicly, and with that problems are RARE. the thigns you should look at are the features you want, most importnatly onboard sound, soundstorm is great. usb and firewire may also be needed but they are more a less standard features. sata is something i like/need. 8xagp is just a marketing gimmik but is still nice, apart from that all mobos using same chipset should perform abuot the same witht he same ocmponents in htem, any differnces will probly be eiher very small or due to bad ios/settings in bios, and tbh, features outweighs any small performace differnce

[payniel]

Yes, i know that quite well, i was stating that i had an MSI KT333 board before my K7S5A and it ran like $hit. THe next board i'm getting is a NF2, and besides, i've never liked VIA .