Best Motherboard

T

thehorseshoe

New member
Right now I have an apollo pro slot 1 motherboard with 640 Megs of RAM. I want a better motherboard. This one was purchased in 1999 and I know something more stable has come out. Any suggestions on a really stable Slot 1 motherboard geared (friendly) for digital audio?
 
Slot one boards are pretty much the way of the dinosaur. The only ones I've seen are socket/slot combo boards, very cheap - built in video audio, network card etc etc. Usually SIS chipset.

If you want to upgrade you will need to go socket 370 for PIII/Celeron, which will require changing your CPU and possibly RAM(if you go Celeron you need PC-100 minimum, PIII 133MHz FSB, you will need PC-133 SDRAM.) RAM is cheap at the moment though, but not for long it went up $20 overnight last week for 256MB.

Board Recommendations.

If you go PIII or Celeron, the ASUS TUSL2-C.

If you go PIV, the ASUS P4B.

If you go AMD - check out what your soundcard manufacturer suggests. This applies to the ASUS boards as well, if there are known problems your SC maker should be aware of them.

What's your current CPU/Hard Drive setup etc., and what are your expectations for track count / plug-in's etc? i.e., what do you need?
 
Thanks Emeric. The setup currently is 640 megs of ram, a 20 gig and 40 gig hard drive @ 7200 RPM, 800 PIII with a 133 FSB, PC 133 RAM (Obviously) a 400 watt power supply, and of course the apollo pro slot one motherboard. Suprisingly enough I got lucky when I bought it (I didn't know any better when I first started out) but it had no onboard sound or video. What do you think about pentium 4 motherboards and processors and DDR? That is what I would really like to upgrade to when I get the money!
 
thehorseshoe said:
Thanks Emeric. The setup currently is 640 megs of ram, a 20 gig and 40 gig hard drive @ 7200 RPM, 800 PIII with a 133 FSB, PC 133 RAM (Obviously) a 400 watt power supply, and of course the apollo pro slot one motherboard. Suprisingly enough I got lucky when I bought it (I didn't know any better when I first started out) but it had no onboard sound or video. What do you think about pentium 4 motherboards and processors and DDR? That is what I would really like to upgrade to when I get the money!
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You are better off going with an Athlon rather than a P4 if you are not going to use the more expensive RAMBUS memory the original P4 boards used. I personally think the Athlon will outperform the P4 using the regular DDR memory.

I currently have a PII-400 and I think this will be the last Intel chip I own. AMD is proving they can provide a supeior product at a lower price.
 
You have a pretty fast system already!

What areas do you find it lacking, out of tracks or out of plug-in power?

I'm using something similiar, P3 800 (100MHz FSB), 512MB, 7200 RPM Drives. I find it adequate for what I do, but am always on the lookout for an upgrade as well.


The P4's use RIMMS.RDRAM as far as I know, I haven't seen any that use DDR, which is something the Athlon systems use.

I'd be really tempted in buying an ASUS P4B, load it up with SDRAM and a PIV 1.6GHz - If I had any money of course....
 
The P4 can use DDR memory, with the new SiS 645 chipset (not too bad, read about it on www.tomshardware.com) or the Via P4x266 chipset (this one embroiled in a legal battle, but a few motherboard featuring it are out).

AMD is a far better overall solution, in terms of bang for the buck and raw performance. The motherboard that's really making waves is the Asus A7V266-E, with 5.1 onboard sound, and optional RAID controller. About 512 MB of DDR RAM and a couple of 40 GB IBM Deskstart hard drives should get you a killer machine!

Ciao

Sang
 
Just my opinion, but I would avoid ANY motherboard featuring built-in ANYTHING - sound, video, network. Just an inevitable source of headaches.

That aside, I agree that ASUS motherboards are good stuff.
 
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