Motherboard newb.... Help please.

Greets everyone...

With the insaine price decrease in AMD processors I think it's time for me to buy a new computer seeing as how my last was a year ago.

All my life I have gone the OEM route purchasing from Dell, and I have been pretty satisfied. Now, however I'm getting into graphics-intensive gaming and such and I can't deal with an OEM geforce2 that won't take detenator drivers. So someone help me out here...

I need an AMD motherboard capable of DDR ram and upgradable to say... 1.5 to 2 gigs of it. I need a fast bus since I'm going to do a lot of video work... AGP 4 of course, and plenty of room for expansion. Possibly a harddrive controler or somthing built in... I don't know what's the best.

I just need some help and have no idea where to start. Someone help me out please. I need a badass motherboard.

-r2

Hey r2,
If you can wait, you should until Tom reviews the MB's with the SiS 645 chipsets(Intel P4's running DDR PC2400 Ram) or SiS 740 chipsets(AMD Athlon's running "supported" DDR PC 2400 Ram). Also this Mystical Nvidia "nForce" chipset should ship soon(who knows though, there is so much BS going around about this chipset). If you need a MB right now, Check out a Iwill board with a Ali Magic chipset, but make sure it is a "BO" bios version(& no I don't know how you can be sure of this, everyone lies, or doesn't know how to check). If you get a MB w/ the Ali Magic chipset(version "AO" ) it is the slowest DDR MB out there, but very stable. If I were you, I would wait, until some reviews of the new MB's come out. Also the new Athlon "Palimino's" should be coming out at 1.5 ghz with the SSE instruction set that will most likely speed up your video editing. Good Luck!
Peace Out...........tile

looking forward to a lifetime of tweakends

The Asus A7v266 is also a good choice. It runs stabil and fast in my comp. 3 sockets for DDR RAM. 5 PCI, 1 AGP, 1 AMR. It scores very high in the new motherboard tests for Athlon processors on the page.

You have to use ECC RAM if you want to use all 4 memory slots on the KG7. If youre only using 2 slots then any RAM is OK. ASUS A7V266 supports 3 x 1 GB.

The Gigabyte and the MSI AMD 761 boards both support up to 3 GB.

Be sure to do a lot of research yourself and you´ll be fine.

Good luck

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.your signature is wasting perfectly good bandwidth.

Buy something with a VIA chipset, by the time you actually get it to work it will be time to upgrade again!

Back to you Tom...