Motherboard Information

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Ceefore

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Hi,

Could anyone reccomend a good, fast motherboard? I currently have an ECS K7S5A which isn't very good for overclocking, which was a nice cheap reliable board. After talking with some people, they said it could be holding my system back (Athlon 2400XP, 1 gig 2100 DDR, Geforce 4 Ti4400) so now I am looking for another, non-budget board.
Thanks
 
Changing the mobo will at best only increase the speed of your system by a few percent (un-noticable to us humans) if all settings/hardware remain constant.

Of course if you want to run at different settings (ie overclocked) thats a different story, think long and hard about what you want to do (and wether or not it is truly worth it) before making rash decissions. If you change the mobo will you need to upgrade the mem to faster/lower cas PC2700? Will you need a new case/psu? What abou the cpu/cooling etc, etc?

If you aren't carefull you will end up building a new pc (which is great if thats what you want) for the sake of trying to achieve a 'faster' pc that could well be done via other means. Eg, would a new HD, gfx card, faster memory,etc be more inline? Have you configured the services to speed up the pc?

What I'm trying to say is a new mobo is only part of the story (so don't expect miracles) and do you really need more speed or do you do a lot of video/digital imaging work? If its games your intersted in have you tried playing with your gfx card?

Remember 90% of all pc uptime is normally spent idle.
 
Thanks for the tips roho, I am thinking of upgrading my motherboard since currently my setup looks like this;

AMD 2400 XP 133mhz FSB
Gainward Geforce 4 Ti4400
1 Gig 2100 DDR Mem
60 Gig Maxtor UDMA5 HDD
ECS K7S5A motherboard

After just upgrading the CPU since I thought this was the weak link, the performance increase was less than I expected. In older ghames like Half Life, My FPS floats at around 70fps when theres a couple of people on screen, and can go down to 30fps when the action kicks off. In addition, my 3dMark 2001 score was 9500 points after the upgrade, and I have seen similar systems get better results than these.
I have tried the basics of tweaking my system - No AA, Disable V-Sync, Set sliders to Performance in driver control, Clocking the Graphics card up some etc but there doesnt seem to be anything I can do to get a performance increase.
After speaking with some people, I have been told my motherboard could be slowing the system down, which sounds about right as it is a cheap and cheerful jobbie, but then I think I am a little out-of-my-league and I dont have a clue what the problem is!
Anyways, any advice is as always, appreciated..
 
I have the Asus A7N8X Deluxe and I love it. It has the SATA, Raid, onboard audio (sounds GREAT) 2 NIC's, 6 USB 2.0 ports, among other things.

I know that when I want to upgrade my CPU, this board can handle it.
 
A new mobo would certainly help in speeding things up, and the old K7S5A is a bit dated, so it would certainly be the a good investment.

What I was trying to say in my previous post was that the mobo isn't the only thing you need to think about. It all boils down to time/money and return on investment ( but a good modern mobo is probably the best place to start, note start not achieve).

Probably the best place to look for a mobo (the one above is rated highly) is in reviews (mags or online) and see what everyone else is using.

But remember its the little things (like only using good quality/high speed memory or cooling etc) that can wreck your chances of creating a demon speed machine (or forgetting to turn off AV, firewalls and anything running in the tool tray/background services).

Oh and don't forget your sound card is just as critical when playing games as all the other components (ever wondered why some tests are done without sound?) when played in the real world (not synthetic benchmarks), and take most 'posted scores' with a MASSIVE pinch of salt.

Have a read of this thread:

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/t1060218393
 
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