new to amd need help please

[Guest]

hello everyone, I used to have a <should I say the p word p3,450 and the dam thing blow up. well now I want to be on the winning side and just got a amd 1.4 athalon chip and now I need a motherboard. I see alot of posts on the chip sets so here we go one more time. I would like an o/c board that is stable. I don't know what this "raid" is < and don't say black flag makes it hehe> I heard via is coming out with the kt266a? and ecs has the sis735? and abit and asus are top names but how about price? I need to build from the ground up, vid,sound,ddr memory and power supply. All I have right now is the ata mid tower, maxtor 60 gig 7200rpm drive,generic dvd 16x/40x so can anyone please help me out? I would like to get the most out of my money and the computer will be mostly for games like everquest. thanks for all replies

 

[o1die]

If you scan through previous posts, you will find recomendations for the Gigabyte GA-7DXC, Epox 8K7A, Abit KG-7, etc. Several new boards should be out in the next couple of weeks with the sis 735 and via KT266a chipsets. I saw the shuttle AK31 version 2 for only $85 at one website, an excellent buy. If you are serious about getting the best board for your situation, I suggest you scan through several pages in this forum looking for compatability issues with specific video and sound cards, then make a board selection based on which cards you are going to use.

 

[Guest]

Well, I can't help much on the board comparisons. I use the ABit KG7-Raid and like it, but chose it because I had good luck with previous ABit boards (BE6-II, KT7-Raid) It works great but I am sure there are really better peeps to steer you.

But the Raid thingy... that's why I replied. It is a system that lets you "stripe" hard drives making up to 4 of them look like a single huge one. or you can "mirror" hard drives to always write to two at once so you have a back-up if one fails. Finally, you can stripe and mirror two pairs if you want to.

I chose the Raid version because it gave me 2 additional IDE ports (total of 8 devices can be used)

 

[madmike]

"I want to be on the winning side and just got a amd 1.4 athalon chip..."

Be careful.... don't start something!

RAID: <A HREF="http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/product/markeditorial.html?prodkey=quick_explanation_of_raid" target="_new">http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/product/markeditorial.html?prodkey=quick_explanation_of_raid</A>
Note that the IDE RAID controllers you'll find on alot of mobos only provide levels 0, 1, and 0+1. Whether or not it's worth the extra $$$ depends on what you do with your comp. Disk intensive operations will benefit from RAID 0, RAID 1 will give you fault tolerance. RAID 0+1 will give you both.

 

[evil_homer]

Well for the board I would suggest anything with the AMD 761 chipset, I would go with an A7M, if you have the money, but EPOX makes some very nice boards with the same chipset for a little less. I don't know what you want out of a video card but I would ask the guys in the graphics section what they think.


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[Guest]

I am doing the very thing your talking about and my research has revealed a few things. Abit KG7-raid or Asus A7M266 or A7A266 seem to be the best liked boards, I like the RAID board. I like stripeing 2 HD's with RAID 0. Striping breaks a file into smaller parts, and writes the data parts alternately to the drives cache, which then writes that data to the disk, but at a much slower rate. It effectively speeds up the read/write times. However if one of the drives fail you only have half your data and the system won't function. But HD's are reliable enough, that if you back up critical files often, you'll be able to sleep at night. RAID 1 mirrors the drives, but if a file becomes corruped, the mirror is too. I don't see an advantage to RAID 1. AMD is also power hungry. Try to use 350W-400W power supply. Price wise Asus A7A266 seems lowest, and this board uses either SDRAM or DDR SDRAM.