October Motherboard Recommendations

Warren Togami warren at togami.com
Thu Oct 11 01:06:22 PDT 2001


Recommendations from Ryan and Lars, the two main reviewers of AMDMB.com.
You will want any motherboard with the VIA KT266A Chipset.  It has amazing
performance benefits over all other DDR SDRAM Athlon motherboards.

Budget : Shuttle AK31 Rev3.1
$95+ but a very excellent motherboard.

Mid-range: EPoX 8KHA+
$120+

High-End : MSI K7T266 Pro2-RU http://www.blargoc.co.uk/reviews/k7t266pro2/
$180+
This motherboard has onboard Promise RAID.  Read my last post about Promise
and HPT RAID Linux compatibility.  With some kernel patching your system
will run fine with RAID 0 with the ATA RAID driver.

If you can wait about two months, new motherboards using the nForce chipset
will be available.  This is a chipset made entirely by nVidia that has
performance well beyond even KT266A.  It doubles the bandwidth of the DDR
SDRAM by using two parallel channels.  It has a built-in Geforce2 MX
graphics controller at AGP 6x, integrated 4-speaker high quality sound
controller, 10/100 ethernet, 56k modem, and additional AGP 4x slot if you
want to use your own AGP video card.  This will be a totally AMAZING
motherboard chipset, making a low cost integrated motherboard that also
outperforms anything else on the market.  Buy one of these motherboards,
case, CPU, hard drive and RAM, and you got yourself a complete system for
about $400.

Cheapest CPU
Athlon-C Thunderbird 1.4GHz
$105

Better CPU
Athlon XP 1500
$125

Best CPU
Athlon XP 1800
$225

I recommend buying the cheapest "Palomino" Athlon that is really 1.33GHz.
The Athlon XP model numbers reflect the equivalent performance when compared
to older Thunderbird CPU's.  Yeah, the CPU rating thing is entirely
marketing, but the numbers really show the true power.  This cheapest Athlon
XP doesn't cost much more than the Athlon-C  Thunderbird, but it has SSE and
many other design improvements.  It should also overclock to anywhere
between 1.5-1.8GHz.   (That would be over 2100 and up in XP rating.
Yeowch.)


Dual Processor Motherboards
------------------------------
If you want insane performance, here's the pricing on Dual Athlon
motherboards currently available from only Tyan.

Tyan Thunder K7 with 64-bit SCSI
$450
Tyan Thunder K7 without SCSI
$380
Tyan Tiger K7
$240

All three motherboards have 64-bit PCI slots (fallback to 32-bit just fine).
Thunder K7 has two built in Intel 10/100 ethernet.  Be warned that Thunder
K7 requires a special 460W power supply, but Tiger K7 should work fine with
standard ATX 300W.  I recommend using ATX 350W with the Tyan Tiger K7.  All
three motherboards require "Palomino" processors, these are Athlon XP and
MP.  Don't buy the MP.  XP works fine, and considerably faster.  Within a
month or two more dual Athlon motherboards from other vendors like Gigabyte
are coming to market.

All three motherboards have been shown to outperform Intel's fastest dual
Intel Xeon systems in most benchmarks, despite the massive cache of the Xeon
machines.  Xeon machines are considerably faster for only a few things:
Quake 3 Arena, and MP3, MPEG and DIVX ;) encoding.  Dual Athlon won in all
other benchmarks, sometimes with even a SINGLE Athlon beating the dual Xeon.



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