What motherboard can you recommend?

[nexus80]

I will be opening a shop that offer computer sales and services. And I decided to stick with two motherboards for the mean time. One for low end and one for high end.

What motherboard for socket 478 can you recommend? I will be selling celeron 1.7 and pentium 4 for the mean time.

Any tips about computer hardware you can give for computer shop owners?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Scout]

Donno where you're located, but I would think it would be pretty tough to start a business with offering just two boards! Anyway, whatever two you pick, in three months they'll be discontinued and you'll have to pick something else.

For my two cents worth, I'd recommend MSI boards. They work well and offer both high end and low end boards. Get one of their integrated graphics boards for your low end and probably an 845PE board for your hight end... for now.

If you'll pardon my saying so, it's a little strange you would be asking basic questions like these if you've already decided to go into the business. Running a computer store is pretty cutthroat now-a-days. The biggest thing you have to worry about is buying obsolete products... they may not be obsolete when you buy them, but after sitting on your shelf a while, nobody wants them and you lose your shirt!

But whatever... good luck in your new venture!

Scout
700 Mflops in SETI!

 

[Tilepusher2]

Yo N,

I totally agree with Scout. I love the MSI line of products. They offer a very good price to performance ratio, support over-clocking, have easy software & bios updates, & most importantly use a very wide variety of chipsets of all major brands. Very hard to find fault in any of their current mobos.

Before I recommend two mobos, have you looked at the prices of hardware in your city vs. the internet prices(like newegg.com)? Do you know your market(are they replacement/repairs- buyers/builders or are they Gamers/over-clockers. Do you understand Gamer mentality(the need for speed), or is Rock solid durability/stability all that matters?..............how does profit margin fit into your product selection?

Okay without knowing anything about your market strategys, here are my picks:

MSI 845 PE Max, based on the Intel 845PE chipset($92 @ Newegg.com)
MSI GNB Max, based on the Intel Granite Bay E7205 chipset($ not priced yet........should be over $150)

Both mobos are DDR mobos, I feel Intel is going to move away from Rambus technology/RD-Ram, & stocking RD-Ram may not be in your best interests. The Intel based chipsets are not very over-clocking friendly, but have the name-brand status & are very stable. The SiS based chipsets for the P4's are more over-clocking friendly, but you might have to hold your customer's hand or end up with newbies trying to return burned out products.

Ask your repeat customers what products they are intersted in buying that you don't stock, & that will give you a idea of what kind of purchases they will be making in the future. Good Luck in your venture.

Peace Out.............tile2

Why do you want to believe me?

 

[Civilized]

I worked for a computer shop here in charlotte for about two years before taking my current job. Besides sells in office, we did alot of business by traveling to two day computer shows etc. At these shows we would sell an enormous amount of inventory. We would always take barebones and create package deals, which seemed to work nicely. I would get two to three different manufacturers of mobos. My suggestion is Asus, Abit and Gigabyte. I would also suggest a "value" board such as Albatron, who makes some great motherboards at very good prices which sell great. For cheap motherboards I would stick to the sis line (sis648's). The new sis655 mobos will be hitting the market soon and will prob be super cheap and will more than likely out perform the upper more expensive mobos from intel. For upper end (more expensive) motherboards I would of course go with the intel chipsets. Right now I would stick to the PE chipsets because the granite bays are just too expensive for what they are. Well i better get back to work good luck

 

[nexus80]

As I read on your replies, it seems that you give more emphasis on the chipset on the motherboard. I'm not very familiar with this. What does the chipset do on the motherboard? Is it the chipset that will depends on the cost of the motherboard?

 

[tuesday630]

Here's a link to Intel's chipset comparision chart. It will show you how different chipsets have different features such as front side bus speed, AGP speed, USB support level and number, RAM type and speed, etc.

<A HREF="http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/linecard.htm" target="_new">http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/linecard.htm</A>

There are also good articles here to read. Also, I think that Intel is currently charging about $57 for the 7205 chipset to manufactures. As you know, some low-end mobo's cost that much.

---There may be more than one way to do it, but why would anyone want to remove the fur from a feline?---

 

[tombance]

Perhaps you ought to learn a little more before you rush in an open up a computer shop. Yes, chipsets are very important factors of mobos that are responsible for the speed and stability of a motherboard. I agree with tile that you will need to use stable motherboards or chipsets. You dont want people constantly coming back with crashing problems. Can you imagine having to say to a customer 'its always gonna crash, you have a crap chipset'. Since its often very difficult to solve stability problems its best to stay away from unstable motherboards, especially chipsets that are unproven or still immature. Im not sure how much Intel motherboards cost, but for Skt478 systems I hear that they are very stable. They dont overclock but this doesnt matter (you dont want to encourage your customers to overclock and then claim warranties on you). Perhaps you should also consider offering some athlon systems. They are cheaper in comparison to p4 systems just as stable. I reccomend the MSI 745 Ultra for a low end Athlon motherboard as it has the SiS745 chipset - very stable with relatively good performance. If you do go for athlon systems I reccomend staying away from older VIA chipsets such as the KT133(A) as they were relatively unstable and as far as I have read had many compatibility problems (your worst nightmare when building a computer to sell) although modern ones such as the KT333 are apparently much better.

<A HREF="http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=5467618 " target="_new">Almost Breaking 12k!!</A>

 

[bdaley]

Dude, no offense, but I can't believe you're going to open up a PC shop with your obvious lack of knowledge.

Do you even know how to build and configure a PC? From your questions, I kinda doubt it.

"I'm a man armed with a fork in a land of soup."

 

[nexus80]

Thanks for being frank. I must admit that I have less knowledge about computer hardware. I'm more into computer software development.

I just decided to open a PC Shop because I found out that computer hardware shop here in our place will be very feasible. The owner of one of the existing computer shop here doesn't even have any idea about computer but he's doing very well. He rely only to his technicians. Good for me that I still have background on computers.

That's why I decided to study about computer hardware. Any other site you can suggest to learn computer hardware for beginners like me?

 

[jlanka]

where are you located?

<i>It's always the one thing you never suspected.</i>

 

[nexus80]

Have you heard about ECS(Elitegroup) motherboards? They are very popular here in our place because of it's low price and is stable enough.

Their website is at www.ecs.com.tw.

What can you say about their products?

 

[bdaley]

I know much more about hardware than I know about software development.

Wow, where are you located? Maybe I could open up a shop there, LOL.

I like tomshardware, anandtech, and hardwarecentral. There are many others.

Posting questions here would be a good way to learn too.

Good luck with your shop.

"I'm a man armed with a fork in a land of soup."

 

[nexus80]

I'm from the Philippines.

I guess you could gauge my capability on computer hardware. Any tips on where I shall start to learn about all these hardware stuff? How did you learn all of this when you started on computer hardware?

 

[Tilepusher2]

Yo N,

IMHO, Shuttle makes the best low cost/stable mobos. ECS is making much better mobos than just a few years ago, but if you only have one make of mobo, I still would go with MSI.

Good Luck....................tile2

Why do you want to believe me?

 

[jlanka]

How did you learn all of this when you started on computer hardware?

I bet every one of us has funy stories about our learning curves. The very first thing I did was upgrade an 8086 from 256K to 640K, and install a Seagate ST225 20MB drive i bought for $200 (never could get that pup to boot off the drive). I then seriously started hardware hacking on my 486 (can't remember the mobo brand name but it had a Vesa localbus) w 4mb RAM and a 120MB Conner Hard drive running Win 3.1. First thing I did was install an Adaptec 1542 SCSI adapter, and a DEC RZ24 SCSI hard drive. I then forged ahead to memory upgrades, then more SCSI hard drives. Then Video card upgrade, and sound card installation, then network adapter (10-Base-2 DEC card). I had to wrestle with IRQ problems big time. Many times my wife heard "$hit $hit $hit" coming from the office where I was cutting my teeth. She actually banned me from there for a while ;-)

Once I brought home a 256K COAST module (after I had swapped out for a Shuttle FX chipset mobo) from work. I mistakenly assumed it would be pin compatible with my board. When I turned it on, smoke started pouring out of the cache slot. So much for that board.

I also made the classic mistake in the fdisk utility of deleting a parition (which had a bunch of good stuff on it) instead of creating a new one. Never made that mistake again.

The bottom line of course, is it takes more than a few weeks to get used to doing this stuff. You'll make your share of mistakes no doubt. It's gotten a bit easier with the newer hardware and OS's (PCI instead of ISA, Plug-and-Play, XP etc.) But there are still strange things that can happen. This forum is testimony to that.

Good luck with your business.

<i>It's always the one thing you never suspected.</i>

 

[Casper5714]

Nexus,

It's not a good idea to just start with two motherboards. Instead, why don't you connect with a distributer. They will have lower prices than retail stores so you will be able to make a profit off the margin. All you need is a reseller certificate, which you would need if you were to open a computer store anyways.

Here are a few distributors to look at

Techdata
Ingram Micro
Amax (www.amax.com)
Ma Labs

I only know one website for the distributors listed above but you can just google them to find the others.

Good Luck

Casper

 

[SidVicious]

May I suggest you look at <A HREF="http://users.erols.com/chare/main.htm" target="_new"> This page </A> It's a good source for information on the different chipsets and processors that were made since the 486 up to now, It even have some info on not yet relased piece of hardware.

I would also suggest you look into AMDs offering, It can't be a bad idea because you never know when a customer will knock to your door and ask for an AMD based computer. AMD is a good alternative to Intel, generally better priced for similar or superior performance. The downside is that AMD based computers are not as idiot-proof as Intel based ones. There are many lies and stories about AMD products being bad or unreliable, much of it is false.

Take your time and read the forums, you'll have a good idea on which boards are the best ones for your needs.

Fok Speling Misstake

 

[DCB_AU]

You can't go wrong with Asus, Intel, MSI and Gigabyte Mainboards- must have an AGP slot and onboard sound.

Good "Luck", you'll need it.

DCB_AU

 

[Flipphone]

seems to me that this guy better not open crap he dont know what is going to sell us smart peeps. dood dont open any comp shop ur to stuoid and it will just give the goverment ur cach for screwing up man i got your back