picking out a socket A mobo

[jon_schug]

This newbie needs a little bit of help picking out the mobo for his new comp. I don't want anything with on-board sound or vid, cuz it's gonna be (mostly) for gaming. I've found a few boards, but I'm not knowledgable enough to make a good choice. Also, could you ppl plz post any pertinant info you might have on choosing a good mobo in general? Okay, here are the reasonable-looking one's i've found so far:

Gigabyte Ga-7Ixe-4 Socket A - Atx
Socket A for AMD 200Mhz FSB processors
3x DIMM
Supports PC100/PC133 SDRAM memory
2 USB ports (supports up to 4)
1x AGP 4x
5x PCI
1x ISA

Asus A7V-E VIA-KT133
Socket A fro AMD processors
2x DIMM
6x PCI
1X AGP 4x
support for up to 4 USB ports


Thanks alot:D

[Peter M]

No point in buying an SDRAM-only board anymore.

Especially ECS K7S5A SDRAM-or-DDR board is so fast and cheap that this shouldn't really be a question. You get an extremely low latency onboard LAN on this board - and an onboard sound for free which can of course be disabled if you'd like to use a PCI sound card.

Those two boards you picked are rather pathetic attempts at building a low cost board: Gigabyte 7IXE4 uses ye olde AMD 750 chipset (100 MHz CPU and SDRAM busses only!), while the ASUS uses the KT133E chip that can't run 133 MHz bus CPUs either (at least it can run PC133 SDRAM).

Use the ECS instead - it runs any socket A CPU, old and new, and also anything from PC100 SDRAM to DDR "266" RAM, maybe even "333".

regards, Peter

[BobyJo]

If you want a really great board, speed, stability, ease of install and setup. I will recommend the Epox 8KHA+. Be sure you ask the vender to setup the board and check out all operations of this board before shipping to you. This will assure you that you get a good board with no problems.

This is a hi-performance Socket A board. KT266a chipset. Right now is the top of the stack for performance and stability.