Best mobo for AMD XP?

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webstop

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What mobo would be good and stable for AMD XP 1700+?
Better be without ingrated sound, but as long as it can be switched off I don't care much.
Onboard video is nice if it can handle requirements of audio software. There will be no gaming on this box, therefore I am not looking for top frame rates.
Thanks.
 
Soyo Dragon Plus

Greetings,

I have done alot of research into this these last few months and time and time again in reviews the Soyo Dragon plus is the best of all the 266a boards.

Its about 150$ so its not a dirt cheap MOBO, but it speed, stability, and features are the best.

It does have onboard sound, but apparently its pretty good, since alot of the reviewers think it is a good as SBLIVE!. It has onboard raid/Lan both of which work great in all the reviews I have read.

The only other two 266a boards that I would consider as runners up are the Soltek SL-75DRV 2 or Asus A7V266-E.

There are many good sites that do MoBO reviews, I remember 5 recent ones all singing the praises of the Soyo's stability and features.

Hope this helps
SirRiff
 
the via chipset has never been regarded as any good. go with a board that has the AMD 761 chipset. like the gigabyte 7dx (i think)... i am going to go with the asus A7M266 (also AMD761)
 
I decided to throw caution to the wind and get an ECS K7S5A :eek:. (SiS 735 chipset)

Go to any forum, and it is the board with the most problems. But I love a challenge...

Queue
 
queue, are you saying that the 761 board has the most problems or the via board has the most problems?
 
The ECS board has the problems. I think it is because it is so cheap that many "first time" PC builders are buying it.

Queue
 
"Toms Hardware" website has a good review of Elitegroup K7S5A mobo, which is one of the few based on SiS 735 chipset. Anybody tried this one yet?
As for ECS K7S5A, yes, many users indicate problems, but on the other side there are many people praising its stabilitiy. Must be a matter of luck, or maybe its the setup and BIOS version, that matters.
 
I'd go with SirRiff on the Soyo, the Soltek, or the Asus. Tom's hardware did a review of all KT266A chipset boards recently, on www.tomshardware.com

The KT266A chipset is by far the best chipset for an AMD XP, period. Soltek came out on top, but because of overclockability in which you may or may not be interested. I'm going for the Soltek myself, because the Asus is about 40% more expensive in this country, and I don't need 6 channels of shitty onboard sound.

On the Gigabyte 7DX-R, it is a very stable and mature board, a bit creaky in the joints perhaps, and nearing the end of its service life, but it's still a very good board with rock-solid stability if you can get the RAID working.

Webstop: I think Elitegroup and ECS are the one and the same. Correct me if I'm wrong on this. The board is stable for most users with the latest BIOS. It's cheap, but offers no major performance advantage over the Via KT266A. It was faster than the KT266, though at the time it was released. But it's dirt cheap!

And you're not gonna find many boards without onboard sound, most of these guys have it. you can always disable from BIOS. You actually should...

Sang
 
Sangram, you are right. Elitegroup and ECS is the same thing.
 
hey again peeps

i think i posted something way back about this board (ECS K7S5A)when i was on the hunt for a mobo.

I decided to get one to use with the omni studio (delta 66) cause of all the via problems. I havent really had much of a problem with it at all . theres one big boo boo and thats that the driver disk for the onboard audio doesnt work but this can easily be downloaded from elite's homepage. Most problems ive read about (cause i wanted to see if it was any good before i bought it) have been people putting the wrong connections into things like the case led's, reset and power switch and then moaning that there board doesnt work. I think for the price its such a quality board - it is extremely stable and has been running well now for 3 months whilst doing long demo-ing of 96kbps recording. I can only give this as experiance since i have never used any other boards to compare it against. hope this helps somebody

JD
 
Countertoattack,

Hi, got to make contact cos im also in Nottingham (hooray) and looking at an ecs75sa to run an audiophile 2496 based system, and was gonna get one till Rwhite said he got one and it was a dog and blew his hard-drive up. HEAVY.
So can you give us an update on your progress on the board and belay my fears.

what kind of stuff r u doing in Notts

cheers
Maston
 
I'll chime in with another recommendation for the Gigabyte GA-7DXR+. No VIA and no SiS, at least on the northbridge.
 
I have been running a Gigabyte GA-7DXR+ as well for a while with an XP1800+ - not a single problem.

- Brian
 
I just finished putting a new system together today with an ecs k7s5a motherboard.Right now I have 384 mb of pc-100 sdram in it because I have gobs of it laying around.Planning to upgrade to ddr ram as soon as finances allow.
I put an xp 1600 cpu in it.When it booted up today,it showed the processor at 1050mhz.Windows xp reports its speed at 1.04 ghz.Is this because of the slow sdram?will it speed up when I install ddr ram?I don't know much about these new high speed boards,so anything any of you who are using one can tell me would be greatly appreciated.
 
I'll have to chime in for an nvidia chipset once again...I've been using the Asus A7N266-C (nforce 415-D chipset) with an XP1700+ for almost a month and I still haven't had to reboot a single time. The pc is used both as a server for sharing my internet connection and as a DAW with a Delta 66 and it works great for both.

It also beats the kt266a in most benchmarks :
http://www.hardware.fr/art/lire/412/8/
http://www.hardware.fr/art/lire/412/9/

I'm very impressed by this motherboard!
 
strmkr,
I'm doing this from memory, so I'll be a bit vague on specifics. I'll follow up from home (where my K7S5A box is) if you haven't gotten it fixed by then.

Go into the CMOS setup when you first start up.
Choose "CPU settings" (or something like that, one of the last menu choices). The setting you'll probably see is 100/100. These numbers represent the FSB (front side bus, processor speed) and the memory bus speed. (Again, I'm not certain which number appears first.) You'll want to set your FSB to 133, and leave your memory at 100. That should bump up your clock speed to ~1.4GHz (which is what the 1600+ is rated at).

Queue
 
Strmkr - Yes indeed, I had an ugly, UGLY time with the ECS 7S5A mobo. I cant prove that it blew my drive, it could have been a coincidence, but it surely had miserable drive performance and a buggy disposition in general.

However SOMEONE out there is obviously makeing them work, if they all perfomed like the two I tried they would have been pulled off the market by now. So I'll be interested to hear how it performs for you.

And Queue's description is right on. I noticed that even though I had PC133 RAM and a Athlon 1.4 (266 BUS) the mobo defaults to a 100/100 setting.
 
That's funny, my drive blew up on the ECS Mobo too. I found at first it was very unstable. Then I switched the DDR i had in there for some SDRAM, and it has worked fine since. Could just be a bad stick of DDR or could be the mobo. I sold it, so I'll never know.
 
Thanks for the help,queue.I went to the pnp cpu settings and found those settings.It won't let you clock the cpu at 133 and the sdram at 100.The settings are 100/100,100/133 and 133/133.I set it at 133/133 just long enough to see what it said as it booted and it identified the cpu as a 1600+ xp,then I set it back.I am scared to try to run that old pc100 ram at 133.Can't wait to get some ddr so I can kick it into overdrive!
 
Don't be scared to run PC100 at 133. If it doesn't work, the computer will crash, and you can switch it back - no damage done. Alot of times, PC100 will clock to 133.
 
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