Athalon 64 BIOSTAR mobo

[eat@joes]

So I'm looking to upgrade to an Athalon 64 but don't need some incredible system. Just something that's going to be faster. I've come across this BIOSTAR board that has the XGP so I can use my AGP card until I decide on a PCI-E card. It's a socket 939 with Nforce 4 chipset. Up to 1000MHz fsb. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813138248

So tell me why it's only $88 as to the average $150 AMD Athalon 64 boards? And why it may not be a super choice. FYI, I wouldn't be overclocking. Just the video card. Again...why is it only $88? On their website it says optical and spdif out. most bells and whistles with it. Even the way everything is aligned on the board is pretty nice and organized.

[Yawgm0th]

Re: Athalon 64 BIOSTAR mobo

It's only a regular nForce 4 chipset, not Ultra, so it's worse in several ways, primarily overclocking, which that's mostly irrelevant and you'll be fine without Ultra (but that answers your question). That's part of the reason. It's still more expensive than other nForce 4 boards, and I'd say don't get it. Biostar has a long history of making poor-quality motherboards (and I do speak from experience here), and I'd recommend against it even if there weren't other, better choices (which there are).


If you want all the RAID stuff that regular nForce 4 boards don't have (including that Biostar), you should probably get a Chaintech VNF4 Ultra as it is cheap, reliable, and feature-full. Even if you wanted to overclock it would do okay. If $10 is too much to pay for the extra chipset features, you'll want to get the Chaintech VNF4. The only major problem with it is that it has (as it's supposed to, unlike the Biostar) it's HTT speed advertised as 800MHz, meaning you'll need to manually set it to 1GHz. This works fine on just about all nForce 4 non Utra/SLI boards, but they usually come with 800MHz as the default HTT speed. Just set it to 1GHz (which probably won't even void the board's warranty - not that anyone would ever know), and you're fine. Better than the Biostar in terms of reliability, and cheaper too.

[eat@joes]

Re: Athalon 64 BIOSTAR mobo

Thanks. The one feature I liked on that board was the XGP slot. I really don't feel like throwing the money down for all new stuff. Especially since my agp card is still good enough to play everything. I guess I'll try and crank out as much life from my old board and cpu as long as I can until it finally kicks the bucket.

[wayout44]

Re: Athalon 64 BIOSTAR mobo

When will people learn to spell "Athlon" right?

But that's beside the point atm as I'll tell you about that XGP slot, its an AGP slot connected to the PCI bus so you will be running any attached AGP card in PCI mode which in turn will greatly hinder any video performance your card may have.

As stated before though, BIOSTAR is a cheap and nasty manufacturer.

[eat@joes]

Re: Athalon 64 BIOSTAR mobo

Yeah, I've done more research on that. And it 1:30 am when I posted which is why I spelled it wrong. It definately is a crap ass board. I'll probably get a 939 board with an AGP slot. Thanks for all the info. I also wasn't aware of how the XGP worked. Thanks.