Feature rich, stable Athlon compatible motherboard

[Guest]

Hey folks, first time posting here. Hope that I can get some useful information.

I'm intending to purchase a new machine in early November, but I'll be heading out to this weekend's computer fair at the LA Fairplex to check the prices currently available. I've been reading with interest the various motherboard articles that cover Athlon compatible CPU's, and the thing I'd like to find out is how prevalent the problems are with VIA's motherboards when paired with a Creative Labs soundcard.

I recently purchased a machine for my wife that paired a Soundblaster Live! value soundcard with a generic "Azza KT3-AS" motherboard based off the VIA KT133A chipset, and was surprised at some of the problems that she's been having with the machine. Typical problems under Win98 running Diablo 2 would be hangups followed by a forced reboot or sound suddenly cutting out and being replaced with a high pitched whine. It seems these problems are roughly similar to what other people are describing as a common problem with VIA based boards and Live! cards.

My question, -is this really a commonplace problem? Is it a problem with ALL Via boards and any Soundblaster card? I was very interested in reading about VIA's Apollo KT266A board, but was concerned when reading a different review of the Soundblaster Audigy card having stability issues. Does anyone have experience or advice on this? I read the article on boards based on AMD's 760 chipset and felt that ABIT's KG7-RAID to be an acceptable solution, but the performance quality noted in Thomas Pabst's has me wondering whether I should take a chance with the VIA board.

Anyone want to weigh in with their thoughts about this? I'd be much appreciated. Thanks!

-Brian Reynolds
-'scuse me while I ramble on...

 

[o1die]

I use the amd 761 chipset on my fic ad11, and it is quite stable and will run fine when overclocked 10-15%. I hope you will avoid temptation and not purchase anything at a computer fair. You will get much better deals on pricewatch by shopping for components individually, or buying a complete generic system from any number of venders listed under pc windows. You simply pick your processor speed, and scan through the pages until you find the features and specs you like. Then call the vender, and ask him about build time and be sure he has everything you want in stock. As far as future chipsets are concerned, I'm still waiting for the kt266a for my next project, and I suggest you do the same. And if you want to avoid some potential conflict issues with soundcards, just get a board with built in sound, which may reduce some of the problems with via.

 

[Oni]

Via is a chance to take with the KT266a if you want the maximum performance. If your buying in november the nvidia nForce will be thorougly tested and probably have newer bios revisions to match or beat KT266a's performance. At the moment nforce is good in some things and KT266a is good in others.
I have an Epox 8K7A+ which is based on the AMD761 chipset teamed up with a 1400 MHz Thunderbird. I run it at 1575 MHz with at Front side bus of 150 (300 MHz DDR CAS2) and its rock stable. My typical uptime is 4 days to a week or more without rebooting a single time. With my setup I have zero problems except I need to reinstall windows, I can't remember the last time I got a blue screen of death.
PC Specs:
1.4 GHz Tbird @ 1575 MHz
Swiftech mc370 with Delta black label HSF (49c idle 55c load)
256 megs of PC2400 Corsair ram @150 CAS2
Epox 8K7A+ motherboard
One IBM 45 gig 75 GXP, and Two IBM 40 gig 60 GXP drives in RAID-0
Visiontek Geforce 3
Hercules Game Theater XP
Netgear FA-310 10/100 NIC
and I'm about to buy new CD burner and DVD drives. I have a Creative labs 32x-6x DVD drive, and a Sony 4x-2x-24x burner.
My case is modded to have 4 fans intead of 2 and I only have a generic 300 watt power supply (I guess its good quality generic).