Personal Experiences with Athlon64 Motherboards

M

mlbstar10

Gawd
Joined
Jul 14, 2001
Messages
668
OK so there is much talk about what motherboards are the best for the Athlon64 is, and all preform pretty close to the same, so i'm depending mostly on personal experience for what i'm choicing. I currently only have experience with one motherboard:

MSI K8T NEO-FIS2R

I did not have a great experience with this motherboard. It has the KT800 Chipset, and firstly it didn't come actively cooled, which isn't a really big deal, but it was still getting very hot (up to 37 degrees system temp) and the sink was burning to the touch. There are also BIOS problems when the motherboard turns on the screen says NO BIOS INSTALLED, while there is a bios installed (obviously as the computer works) and MSI hasn't come up with a fix for this annoying problem. Finally i am having a problem with the SATA RAID saying that nothing is installed, and it takes about 5 seconds to get by this screen. There is probably a way to turn this off in the BIOS, but i couldn't find it, and it probably shouldn't show this message anyway, as i never tried to run anything in SATA or RAID. The bottom line is this board has many little quirks in it, most which could probably be fixed with a BIOS fix, but as of right now i wouldn't recommend it.

Within the Next few days i'll be working with the Shuttle Athlon64 board and i'll add another post foth that motherboard.

Now i'll be asking anyone who has experience with any of the Athlon64 motherboards to make a post, so we can see how they all are for other [H]ers personally.
 
I got an ASUS SK8V, which is also based on the VIA chipset however its for the FX line. Motherboard temps get about 40 C most of the time. No problem with the BIOS except for the lack of CPU multipliers which I hope they add later. Drivers were very easy to install and I have had no problems with it. The Black PCB looks very good especially with the yellow. Setup was very straight foward for anyone who knows what they are doing. I didnt really need the motherboard manuel other then the jumpers. It was decently written from the little that I read. The motherboard is only cooled by a heatsink, but it does its job. I dont have a SK8N so I cant really compare it to that, but I would recommend this board easily to anyone planning on getting an FX/Opteron
 
Sc0rched...update your BIOS. The latest version (1004) offers full multiplier control (for FX's anyhow).
 
Sc0rched...update your BIOS. The latest version (1004) offers full multiplier control (for FX's anyhow).
Click to expand...

You are thinking of the SK8N(nForce 3), I am using the SK8V(Via). The SK8N is an older motherboard and is on 1004. SK8V is pretty new and is only on bios rev 1001 which doesnt offer multiplier adjustments.
 
Shuttle AN50R

I just built another 3000+ system with this board today. It has the Nforce 3 150 chipset, and this seemed much more stable than the previous KT800 that i had worked with. I had no problems with this motherboard, everything went smoothly. It did not to seem to have as much overclocking choices, but the smoother sailing it gave over the MSI board made me believe its a better board in its current state than the MSI 754 pin board.
 
Gigabyte GA-K8VNXP (VIA K8T800)

I built an Athlon 64 3000+ machine with this. My only complaint is that it won't run my Kingston HyperX PC3200 CAS2 memory at... CAS2. The memory specifications call for 2-3-2-6-1, but I run it at 2.5-3-3-8-1. I can run it at 2.5-3-3-6-1 manually, but I found no benefit from this, so I left it on automatic after getting frustrated with reboots with other settings. Otherwise, I'm using the IDE Raid, the SATA Raid, USB, Firewire, onboard audio... everything works great. One other minor complaint would be that the daughter card with the extra "power stage" or whatever it is, DPS, doesn't sit as tight as I'd like it to. But it hasn't given me any problems... and it does light up which is neat :)
 
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