I am relying once again on the genius' of these forums. You guys confuse the he!! out of me and I am not that stupid. I am saying this because I have read thru these forums and cannot decide what the best gaming MB would be.
What I am looking to do:
1. Play the latest games (Half-Life 2 for example)
2. Get the best MB that supports AMD64 (939 or 940 or 754?)
I can get PCI-E later.
3. Able to be overclocked
4. Save money for a Kick-a$$ video card
Would like to wait for the new boards, but as time goes by it is getting more difficult. Need to upgrade...
You should be looking for the socket 939 type. No current MB has PCI-E for AMD CPUs. Nforce 4 will fill that void, boards are (expected) to be available soon.
What makes a good Gaming Board? support for the latest vid cards(you got that with PCI-E), good sound (on board sound is much better than it used to be a few years back)
Other considerations:
Gigabit Ethernet for private lan parties if you can afford the gigabit hub/switch as well.
if you go to lan parties, a small form factor can be interesting like micro ATX.
some software bundles include games.
<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by snotling on 11/05/04 02:24 PM.</EM></FONT></P>
Even when Nforce4 boards do get here, you'll be paying a price premium just because they're new, <i>plus</i> the boards won't be 'proven' like many boards are now. PCI-E simply doesn't really have an inherent advantage at the moment - even AGP 8X is not really being fully exploited by the top cards (it's only a meagre couple of % faster than AGP4x with the absolute top-end cards), so it's not being a bottleneck.
I would just get a nice nforce3 250Gb board, like the MSI K8N Neo2. I've seen a number of people say that Gigabyte make a better board for overclocking, but the nutter who was running a FX-55 @ ~3.8Ghz (!) was using the MSI (albeit heavily modified), so it can't be <i>that</i> bad..
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"Sex without love is an empty experience...
But as empty experiences go, it's one of the best" - Woody Allen
Will this board work for me? MSI "K8N Neo2 Platinum" NVIDIA nForce3 ULTRA Chipset. I don't do the LAN party stuff and just now got into broadband, so I don't know if this is overkill for me or not. What I do with it will determine I guess:
Broadband gaming
Work from home using AutoCAD (going through my companys server)
These 2 things will be the most intensive stuff I will use this computer for. On board audio isn't important as I bought the SB Audigy 2 ZS package (btw, is that a good sound card?). I am now thinking I don't need that because of of what Snotling said about on-board being better now. So, please let me know. Thanks!
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