ABIT NF7-S Uncertainty

[Apreche]

I've been out of the harware news for oh, 3 years. Which is when I built my current PC a P3 450mhz. So it's finally come around that my current PC is obsolete. From reading tom and other sites and magazines I've decided mostly what I'm going to put in my new box. Among other things I've decided on the Abit NF-7S motherboard. My current BX6r2 served me so well and is so rock solid I really can't bring myself to switch brands. There are still two components however, that I am unsure on. They are video card and ram.

From reading on the nforce2 there is apparently a version with and a version without an integrted GPU. I'm unsure from reading whether or not I need to buy an actual AGP video card if I get this board. If I don't have to I won't, seeing as the integrate GPU benchmarks well enough for my purposes. If I have to get one, then I need help picking one out. Preferably one that takes full advantage of all the features the board has to offer. That means a GeForce4 of the highest caliber that supports AGP8X. It should also have some sort of TV out (S-Video or whatnot) and one of those special Digital outs for flatscreen monitors (which I will purchase in the future). Anyone know a good card that meets these requirements? Stability then price are most important to me. I just like to use all the features of the hardware I buy so I get my moneys worth.

As for RAM I'm really confused. I fell out of the loop before DDR so the PC2100/2700 thing really confuses me. Apparently the board supports DDR400, but I read some stuff that said I can only have one stick of it? I think another article said that only if you have two sticks a certain feature is enabled. A lot of conflicting/updating information has me confused. I'm only looking to have 256MB of RAM and I would like it in the cheapest/fastest configuration possible. I'm just not sure exactly which sticks to buy. I'd prefer to get DDR400, if reasonable, since that seems to be the advantage of buying this board. I'm also confused about CAS/Registered/ECC and what all that stuff means.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

-----------------
"I EAT YOUR BRAIN"
-Mindflayer

CTHULHU for President in 2004!

 

[livedistortion]

I would say go for the ATI Radeon 9500PRO I think it supports Dx9, so should stay valid longer. I think the Abit board should be a good one, I may get one myself. As far as Ram, it kinda depends on what processor you pick because you want to match the FSB speed with the memory speed. Say you have a XP2600+ with the 333mhz FSB than you would want DDR333. That's not to say that you can't get DDR400 and run it slower to get synchronous operation between the two, this way you're prepared for a future upgrade when DDR400 actualy becomes official and CPU's support it without overclocking. I'm not too versed in graphics cards, but just look into NVIDIA and ATI, if you're not gaming don't worry about getting one of the best or even one with a ton of ram, just look for those features you mentioned. Oh, and I wouldn't go with the built in graphics on the Nforce, it's hard to bypass if you want to upgrade down the line. It's too bad noone answered your post, all the more advanced users don't want to help out us newbies, I just keep searching the web and asking a few questions on message boards, but alot of those opinions are not based in fact.

 

[halkebul]

livedistortion, check your private messages.

<i>It's your world kid!!!</i>

 

[livedistortion]

I checked my PM's and didn't see any, did you send me one? Maybe it's not working right. You can email me if you like. I'm not promoting Abit or bashing Asus, they seem to make the best 2 nForce2 boards. It's just that when people say one is better than the other, they should say why because it may just be a matter of what you need, not that one board is better than the other. I'm just researching as much as possible and learning, being that I'm a little new to this. And the Abit does have a lockable bus. It has that serial adapter and good customer service which is important to me. It seems that the Asus has a little more options in the way of Raid and networking, which doesn't affect me, but if you needed that then the Asus would be better for that person. Well, thanks for reading, if you have any more info for me it is always appreciated. I'd like to know of a good site to learn about overclocking, how do you guys know all this stuff, I've learned about FSB's and Ram, etc... but overclocking takes some more knowhow and I think I'd like to try my hand at it. Could I take the xp2600+ up to a 400mhz FSB without problems or a need for expensive cooling? Or maybe a xp2100 up to a 333FSB? If I buy DDR400, since it's not official is it going to work when the new 400FSB processors come out? Does overclocking shorten the life of the processor or cause instability, I don't want to do anything extreme, just up a couple timings I guess.

Take care

 

[halkebul]

Check your e-mail.

<i>It's your world kid!!!</i>

 

[livedistortion]

Isn't the audio quality pretty similar on both boards?