I need a new mobo

[Dallows]

Okay, this is what I want exactly:

I want a good AMD mobo that supports Barton cpus (fsb 333-400), dual channel memory, and serial ATA.

I think that's all. I could do without all those little extras like onboard lan and stuff. Oh, and for as cheap as possible, but doesn't have to be that cheap. From $50 to maybe $100-120 or so.

[metallicat666]

look at the nforce2 ultra 400 chipset boards
any by abit asus epox msi gigabyte etc will be fine

[Yawgm0th]

This is one I was considering for myself:

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=13-128-190&depa=0

A bit over your budget, but the features are great.

This one is almost as good, but well within your budget:

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=13-131-478&depa=0

Here's another two for less money with Firewire (but no Gigabit Ethernet):

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=13-180-039&depa=0

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=13-170-112&depa=0

[Morgan_Lander]

I vote for the Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe (2nd one Yag posted). I've been running this board for a few months w/o any hiccups.

[Yawgm0th]

It certainly is a good mobo. There are better ones for OCing, but it's still quite nice.

[Morgan_Lander]

For me, Asus and Abit are the safe bets. MSI is a good value as well, though I've had some issues with their K7N2 Delta-L. I've also had some real problems with Epox and am staying the hell away from them ATM.

[Dallows]

I am a big fan of Albatron, mobos and vid cards. So far my experience with them has been excellent, no problems at all. So I would probably like to stick with them. They have a really nice bios usually too, and I like that. Overclocking or gigabit is not all that important to me. I'm going to be waiting on the motherboard till after I get my new videocard and cpu anyway so I should have the money saved for the $100 board no problem. Asus are great boards I know but I just like Albatron, so I'll probably go with them. Just a quick question you guys could probably answer easier than researching myself is the layout of the board, the RAM slots specifically, and why there are two DIMM slots together and one kinda seperated, I know it probably deals with the dual-channel RAM but a clearification would be nice. Thanks guys.

[Yawgm0th]

Yep. Dual channel. Put a stick in the first RAM slot and an identical one in the third (seperated one).

Choose based on features, too. The Asus is better than the Albatron unless you will use Firewire.

[Dallows]

Yeah, I looked at the features kinda, asus has the gigabit, which I won't need, albatron has 6 pci, meh, we'll see. Uh, I have a question as far as like switching your cpu and mobo in a current setup, without a fresh install of windows xp, about problems I could encounter and stuff. Or if there's a way to do it easily. I just don't know about uninstalling drivers for my cpu and mobo from the OS. Where can I post a question about that? Under what forum?

[Dallows]

Yeah, I looked at the features kinda, asus has the gigabit, which I won't need, albatron has 6 pci, meh, we'll see. Uh, I have a question as far as like switching your cpu and mobo in a current setup, without a fresh install of windows xp, about problems I could encounter and stuff. Or if there's a way to do it easily. I just don't know about uninstalling drivers for my cpu and mobo from the OS. Where can I post a question about that? Under what forum?

[Morgan_Lander]

To avoid the most problems, you're best off to reformat and reinstall Windows. You can go into Device Mangler and delete all the devices before shutting down and pulling out the old board, but Windows tends to not like having hard drive controllers swapped out from under it without recognizing it first.

[Dallows]

Yeah, I'm going to have to, it'll just be easier that way. When I get the mobo I will be taking the cpu and mobo of my computer and putting it in the pc the rest of the family uses, upgrading it. The problem will be saving the files on the computer to cds, as it doesn't have a burner. It's the computer the rest of my family uses. I have a burner I could just swap, so no biggie, but they're big fans of AOL and I don't think my mom would like it too much if she lost all her stupid emails and stuff. So I have to try and contact aol about that. New Mobo install on mine won't be a prob though.

[bigjackusa]

Network the pcs. Pull files over the network.

[Dallows]

that's useless as they are networked but it would take to long to transfer all the files.

[Yawgm0th]

It wouldn't take that long. save any really big files to CDs (you'll want them there anyway), but save pictures, documents, and such to other computer's hard drives.