Which is the best chipset?

[derf]

Hello, I'm planning to upgrade my daughter's computer. She uses it for college. She is not a computer gamer. She has a duran 700 now. I plan to get a AMD 2400 XP, 266 bus speed. Which of the 3 boards will give the best results.
1. ESC K7S5A PRO SIS 735 chipset

2. MSI KT2 COMBO-L VIA KT266A VT8235 chipset

3. MSI KM2M COMBO-L VIA PRO SAVAGE DDR KM266

I picked these three becouse I plan to use her 512meg of 133 ram. I then have the option to upgrade to DDR in the future.
We are on a tight budget. Thanks. Derf

 

[RCPilot]

I'd ditch the SDRAM if I were you & get a Nforce board. SDRAM just doesn't cut it, unless you run a gig of it.

Talking experience here. My Son's KT266a board had 512 SDRAM on it. We got him a Nforce & 512 3200 then sold his old board & RAM. I put it together for the guy & he got another stick of 512 SDRAM. With the gig it would boot almost as fast as the DDR board. Thing is it couldn't hold a candle to the DDR RAM.

The other thing is you'll get a lower quality board just to support SDRAM as well.

6 of one, half a dozen for the other, I guess.

Well, I didn't think that was gonna happen!!!

 

[kinney]

The ECS is the best board in that roundup IMO.
I've owned most of those boards and from experience its the most stable.

But I'd get your daughter a Nforce2 if shes using an Athlon for maximum stability and to eek everything you can out of what shes using.. they are cheap enough, a Nforce 2 400 single channel motherboard is about $60-70... then you just need memory which you can get a single 512MB stick.

Athlon 1700+, Epox 8RDA (NForce2), Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9 80GB 8MB cache, 2x256mb Crucial PC2100 in Dual DDR, Radeon 9800NP, Audigy, Z560s, MX500

 

[Spitfire_x86]

MSI KT2 Combo-L.

nForce2 is always recommended.

----------------
<b><A HREF="http://geocities.com/spitfire_x86" target="_new">My Website</A></b>

<b><A HREF="http://geocities.com/spitfire_x86/myrig.html" target="_new">My Rig & 3DMark score</A></b>

 

[jurians]

the k7s5a us a good board thats dumb cheap.... but as everyone said get an nforce2 board

 

[Crashman]

If you REALLY need to reuse that RAM, the 735 chipset is superior to the VIA counterparts, so the K7S5A is regrettably the only choice (it's not a very good board, the others are simply worse).

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>