Motherboard Help Please?

[Kellie's Dad]

I just bought a PC with Athlon 1400, 60 G. Maxtor 7200, 256 mg. SDRam, W98SE, and Audio phile 2496 along with SB live Value for midi...... I bought what I could afford at the time and it included a PC CHIPS Socket A with a lot of onboard crap. I've been having crash problems and the company will take back this motherboard and let me upgrade it. What should I get without spending too much more money.
So far I'm only using Cakewalk HS 9.0 and early version of Cubasis.
Would an ASUS A7SA-266 with onboard audio be okay? Should I look at RAID even though I don't understand it? Should I go to one that use DDR Ram instead?
My options are:
ASUS A7V 133-c WA (w/audio, can be disabled)
ASUS A7A-266 WA
or using DDR;
ASUS A7A-266 WA
ASUS A7M-266

Help appreciated.

 

[elevate]

There have been a few "which motherboard?" threads recently. I plan on getting a Gigabyte GA-7DXR+, which has on board RAID, USB 2, etc.. This isn't the only good socket A mobo, there's quite a few nowadays. Check some of those other threads for others' recommendations.

You probably don't want to use on board audio, though it can always be disabled via the BIOS.

As far as RAID goes, you only need to know about RAID0 and RAID1, as these are usually the only varieties available with motherboards that cost < $200. RAID0 is disk striping, which means that if you have two 20GB drives in RAID0 configuration, then you effectively have 20GB, but your i/o speed is nearly doubled - both drives act as one; half of the data i/o is handled by one drive and the other half by the other. The drawback to this is that if one drive fails, all your data is gone. RAID1 is disk mirroring, which means you have a copy of all of your data in case one of your drives fail. This configuration has no performance benefits. There's also RAID0+1, which is a combination of RAID0 and RAID1, but you have to have four hard drives. RAID3 and RAID5 are the industrial strength flavors.

I just bought a PC with Athlon 1400, 60 G. Maxtor 7200, 256 mg. DDR

Should I go to one that use DDR Ram instead?

Huh? Don't you already have DDR RAM?

 

[Kellie's Dad]

Thanks Elevate. I meant that I have Sd Ram now (I'll edit the mistake), one of the Asus boards they have in stock has Raid (don't know which type) but only uses DDR Ram.

 

[elevate]

Well, it's up to you if you want to spend the money. DDR will give you better performance, as it operates at double the speed of SDRAM - SDRAM operates at 100 and 133Mhz while DDRAM operates at 200 and 266Mhz.

It really doesn't matter what type of RAID that board has (probably 0 and 1). You can use a RAID configuration or not. The IDE channels will still function as regular IDE channels.

I would find out what model that Asus is and then search for some reviews of it on some tech sites like AnandTech, Tom's Hardware, and Hard|OCP.

 

[Basslord1124]

I have heard some problems with AMD boards and SB Lives not working well together. Not sure if it'd cause it to crash or not. The obvious suggestion from many is avoid boards with built in audio but I guess if you can disable it then that's fine. Funny I'm in the same boat as you...eh sort of. I planned on getting the Asus A7A266 (getting the Audiophile for the soundcard too) but learned that there are some slight heat problems with that board...it'll probably work ok but just make sure you keep the processor as cool as possible. Sangram gave me the link for where they were discussing the Asus A7A heat issues...search back through some of the old posts for the link or if you're nice maybe Sangram will post it for you The heat issue concerned me a little and plus I felt it'd be best that I get a board that can take more processor than what the Asus could so I changed my mind...now I plan on getting the Abit KR7A (it's only about $30 more than the Asus). And I know probably as much as you do about RAID. I guess if you still wanna stick with the Asus board make sure you keep it plenty cool! Good luck!

 

[db51]

A7M266

Of the ones you mentionned the Asus A7M-266 comes highly recommended for audio and video work.
It's very stable since it uses the AMD 761 northbridge (ie not a Via northbridge, that's a good thing). Doesn't have RAID but you shouldn't need it anyway.