what Mobo good for Duron

[manou]

Hello,
Please be patient with me, I am beginner with OC stuff,
I am trying to find out what to buy and what not to.
I am tight in budget, and I intend to go for AMD Duron 800 or 850.
But I don’t know what motherboard is good to work with when it comes to OC, does one of these All in one motherboard any good for OC?
Elite? Soyo.. PC chip …etc.
What kind of Hard drive is good for OC,
What kind of RAM is good for OC. Well I know,lots of Qs,
But I have to start from somewhere, I am just reading and reading and getting info,
Appreciate your thoughts,
Thanks, Manou

[Bovon]

Manou, I will try to answer a couple of your questions, but I will also be honest with you as well. I have been looking for a good board for a couple of months now, and thought I had found what I wanted in the Iwill KK266-R, the raid version, altho I am not interested in raid for the stripping or mirror features. I want it because we have been led to believe you can use the raid headers as extra IDE headers thereby having 8 IDE devices.

As these new boards hit the users, however...there are many problems it seems with the KT133a chipset, and may be the new 686B southbridge..or may not be. But something is wrong, even those that do the reviews have some problems after the review, and an attempt to plug in the rest of the necessary, like a NIC, SB live! card, as well as other cards just don't work correctly. So, I cannot even attempt to guess at which board may be a good one for the Duron.

There will be those that stop by here and tell you that they have this board or that board, and it works flawlessly. For every one of these new KT133a boards that work good, if you read at other forums, you will finD about 10 others with the same setup...yelling HELP!!!. I personally believe the KT133a chipset is a good system, but still too immature and needs some factory revisions yet...I may wait several months yet before I invest my hard earned cash for a pig in a poke.

As for your ram. If you will be doing some overclocking when you get setup, it will depend on how high of an overclock you will be going for that will finally decide the type of ram you will need. If you will just be doing some medium overclocking, say up to maybe 150 mhz fsb then some good quality pc133 cas2 ram (sdram probably) should do the trick. I just ordered some Crucial pc133 cas2, and from all reports, this ram will do 150 mhz cas3...so, that will be more than enough for my purposes. Crucial has a promo sale going on right now, and my dram cost $89.24 with free shipping, but of course that is here in the states.

Hard drives are a different story so far as what I an reading. some ppl have had problems with this drive or that drive, but a few of the guys say that if that same drive is used in another board, it works fine...especially the older KT133 boards with the 686A southbridge...leading some to speculate the problem is with the newer 686B chip. If you go with a KT133a chipset board, you will want the 7200 rpm drives, as that is what the 686B southbridge does. If you go with an older KT133 board, then the 5400 rpm drives are fine. I have used Maxtor now for several years, and have had very reliable service with them...but, the IBMs, Western Digital, and others are good as well.

You are very wise to read...post when you have specific questions to clairfy...and somebody will come along to help out. There are quite a few forums...I have several I visit on a daily basis...so, read as much as you can, and do not get in a hurry to buy til you have a good feeling about what you are going for. I understand the limited budget as well as anybody, and certainly do not want to buy into a pain in the neck...as I have read elsewhere.

Hope this was of some help...

[elroy]

1] the all in one motherboards don't overclock well at all, forget it.
2] the Epox 8KTA3 board is very highly rated, overclocks well, is stable, easy to install, has new bios revisions
3] this Epox board is the 3rd in this series, there was the 8KTA, than the 8KTA2 and now the 8KTA3. So they have done a lot of fine tuning on an already good board.
4] when you read posts of problems, remember some of these people have little experience and may not know what they are doing. So their problem may not indicate a true hardware defect.
5] as for ram a good PC133 is probably adequate, most systems aren't going to go over about 140-145 FSB anyway.
6] as for the brand of board, Epox's are great, Iwill is also good and Asus. Personally I'd avoid Abit, they have poor quality control. Most Abit boards work but have 1 or more functions that are defective and they have a high rate of returns for defects.

[ragtop]

You will get lots of different opinions on good motherboards for overclocking. I'm just about ready to build a Duron system myself. I'm looking real close at the MSI K7T PRO 2A, and the MSI K7T Turbo.

These boards seem to be highly rated, and are more reasonable priced than the equivalents from Abit and Asus.

Most of all - keep on reading. It sounds like you're just starting out with building your own systems, and you also indicate you have a limited budget. If so, just concentrate first on building a basic system that runs reliably. Don't worry about all that overclocking stuff until you have some good basic experience. If you don't have a lot of money to waste, you probably don't want to be scratching up your new processor with pencil marks, not to mention running it at excessive voltages and temperatures.

[Underclocked]

I'm also seriously considering plunging back into the AMD world. Been looking hard at the MSI KT7 Turbo at www.newegg.com (http://www.newegg.com) . Excellent price and includes fedex saver shipping. May have to go for it!

[manou]

Thank you guys,
you have been very helpful, now I have only couple of good Mobo in my lists, and trying to choose one of them,
Thanks again.
Manou