Which MB to get for DDR 1.4 266fsb Athlon?

[Guest]

Hi Guys,

I am in the pipeline to get a 1.4 266FSB Athlon. Question is which Motherboard should I get? I have been looking at a few discussions and the Asus A7M266 are scary me off thus my next choice is the MSI KT7Pro.

I plan to use the onboard sound features instead of buying a SBLive. Which MB has a good onboard sound?

Which Motherboard would you guys recommend and are there any others I should consider? What about waiting forfuture SIS 735 Motherboard by ASUS?!??!

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Mick

 

[Guest]

I got a chaintech 7jkd recently, it has fairly decent on board sound... (6 channel.. some cmedia chip...) it sounds fairly good, but get a proper pci sound card...

No way I`m not gonna sign anything without reading it first....

 

[girish]

you could get the Asus A7A266 board, and start with SDRAM and later upgrade it with DDR. his is the only one socket A with a real hardware sound chip onboard. all others have AC97 audio while the A7A266 has a CMedia 8378 chip which offers better quality sound and better performance.

girish

<font color=red>No system is fool-proof. Fools are Ingenious!</font color=red>

 

[Guest]

Hi Girish,

Thanks for the reply but what is the difference between the AC97 and the others that Skuzzz mentioned? I plan to get a SBLIVE in the near future cause it only $129 in New Zealand but I need something that will give me sound for the moment so I could listen to MP3s. This rig will only be a work system and I will not be playing much games only so sound quality isn't a necessity at this moment in time.

What about the A7M266 and the MSI K7T Pro MB? Do they have the AC97 sound chip onboard and how reliable are they? Which would you choose? I heard the A7M266 are having a few problems with their Southbridge.

Mike

 

[xxsk8er101xx]

Hey, i have a GA-7DXR. However it is pricy but the motto "you get what you pay for" holds true for this board. Awsome awsome board. Has onboard sound - i hear it is equivalent to a creative soundblaster PCI 128. thats what it is.. it uses creative sound instead of AC97'. It is 4 channel ready. I haven't used it because i have a sound blaster live x-gamer 5.1 so... but it's good for backup.

I'm sure i have posted my praise for this board somewhere lol so i'm not gonna repeat myself but i love this board.

Have my duron 700 overclocked to 934 and super stable at 1.65volts still need up the juice and see 1050 (150x7)

so there ya go.. oh ya this board is athlon 4 ready ever since F4 revision of the bios and it is now F6. again awsome awsome board.

dam i still need to look up the features the board has still lol... alright good luck!

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?id=9933" target="_new"> My Rig </A>

 

[agpport]

the c-media chip is not as heavy on the cpu as an AC97-codec. It also offers better sound quality and things like 5.1 sound.

the A7M uses Via´s 686B southbridge, which seems to have serious problems with Sound Blaster Live cards.

Really nasty problems. like crackling sound, which is the least annoying thing. Others are lockups, data corruption when transferring large files.

Try to stay away from VIAs 686B southbridge if you want to use a SB live. Unfortunately it seems as if all AMD 761 boards uses it.

Sure, VIA has got "bug fixes" in their 4.31 and later 4-in-1 drivers but they cant fix SB live 5.1 and newer SBlive cards.

I´ll have my A7V266 running when I get some RAM but i cant recommend it since i havent tried it myself yet

The A7V266 also comes with C-media 5.1 onboard sound and it uses vias KT266 chipset with the new 8233 southbridge which reaaly shouldn´t have the same bugs as it predecessor.

_________________________________________
.your signature is wasting perfectly good bandwidth.

 

[Guest]

I've got an a7m266 and an sblive, they've been working fine together with no problems for a couple months, its a nice motherboard, I have no stability problems (heh heh, unless I'm doing something I know I shouldn't be doing ... ummm.... no stability problems under normal usage I mean...