Budget Motherboard Suggestions

[numtel]

you can get little cheapy epoxes for $39 at computer stores that handle pc133 ram and athlon/duron cpus.

[JoshT]

Yeah, it died on me.

Anyway, to recap what I had originally tried to post:

Budget = under US$100
Support Athlon XP, DDR PC2100
As little on board stuff as possible - I have boxes of perfectly good parts at home
Prefer stability, reliability over overclockableness, etc
Probably will buy two, one for me, one for little bro
Looking at MSI KT3 Ultra, IIRC, $77 at newegg, $87 at TCWO.com, which has better shipping rates

[JungleMan]

MSI sucks, get an Abit KX7-333 or get an Epox 8K3A+ if you need onboard sound. Gigabyte also has a nice one with onboard 5-channel Sound Blaster sound and onboard LAN.

[JoshT]

I've have better luck with MSI than Abit...

I don't need onboard anything - I have an older Creative sound card that I can use, and I for NICs I have three 3com 3c905s and three 3com 595s that should be better than any onboard LAN you can get, plus half a dozen brand new linksys NICs...

[JungleMan]

Check out the benchmarks floating around the Internet, it's a relatively slow performer. One of the VBF members here has one and it won't break 150fsb.

Both Abit and Epox can make a quality board, so go with them.

[JoshT]

150FSB? I'm not following - shouldn't it be 200 or 266 for the Athlon XPs?

The Abit is $20 bucks more, and its the only brand of MB I've actually had die on me, so I'm avoiding them for awhile. I'm not familiar at all with Epox, but I might look into a Gigabyte with USB 2.0 - not that I need USB 2.0 for anything. FWIW, you can find people with love or hate any brand of MB...

[JungleMan]

Originally posted by JoshT
150FSB? I'm not following - shouldn't it be 200 or 266 for the Athlon XPs?

The Abit is $20 bucks more, and its the only brand of MB I've actually had die on me, so I'm avoiding them for awhile. I'm not familiar at all with Epox, but I might look into a Gigabyte with USB 2.0 - not that I need USB 2.0 for anything. FWIW, you can find people with love or hate any brand of MB...

I meant as in overclocking, usually people go by the non-multiplied FSB. So yeah, that'd be 300fsb...

Check out Epox, I've had great luck with them. Gigabyte is good too, but I thought that board was about $120

[JoshT]

ABIT KX7-333 Socket A VIA KT333 Motherboard is US$95 @ newegg - the Gigabyte I'm looking at http://www.tcwo.com/cgi-bin/webc.cgi...gi2Ty0WECcd2Jf should be about the same as the MSI.

[JoshT]

Originally posted by JungleMan

I meant as in overclocking, usually people go by the non-multiplied FSB. So yeah, that'd be 300fsb...

I'm not gonna overclock anything, so that's not an issue.

[JungleMan]

Ohh, I thought you were overclocking...well if you're not overclocking, and you are getting PC2100 RAM, why are you looking for a KT333 board?

Check out the Shuttle AK31, it's $60 at Newegg...the Gigabyte one is good too.

[JoshT]

Because it's the latest and greatest, and I might go with PC2700 when the price drops to the same as PC2100.

[JungleMan]

In that case get the Gigabyte..

[kalicki]

I'm the one with the KT3 Ultra, and apart from not O/Cing that much, it's a great board... VERY stable, since I moved to Windows XP, I haven't crashed once... Rather fast also...

PC2700 has like 2% performance gains, it's NOT worth the extra money... The new chipset has fixed some problems present in the KT266s tho...

If you're going to get 256 MB of PC2700, get 512 MB of PC2100 instead... Much better value and performance...

[JoshT]

Ok, Thanks. I wouldn't get PC2700 unless it was the same price as PC2100 anyway. As far as MSI, I've used a K7T266 Pro at work for testing, continually swapping parts and installing OSes and stuff, and its been holding up great.