Benjamin J. Weiss wrote:
I've been thinking of getting an AMD Athlon 2600+ 333MHz FSB, and
an ASUS
A7N8X-E Deluxe mother board.
(
http://usa.asus.com/prog/spec.asp?m=A7N8X-E%20Deluxe&langs=09) I've seen
some potential issues on this list about the nforce2 chipset, so I was
curious about any positive or negative experiences anybody might have had
with this mother board.
If somebody has another recommendation for a motherboard/cpu combo, I'd be
interested in that as well. Basically, I'm trying to get a fast motherboard
and CPU with about 512Meg of RAM for about $250 US. I'm only interested
in good, name brand motherboards and RAM, I've had bad experiences with
cheap ECS crap and don't care to repeat the experience.
I'm using a GigaByte GA-7N400 Pro2 mb, and it's working very well. FC1
detected everything on install. I installed the nforce2 drivers from
Nvidia, but did not really need to do that. This motherboard uses a
RealTek lan chip, so the nvidia lan driver is not needed. FC1 detected
my soundchip as an i810_audio, which worked fine. When I installed the
nvidia audio driver, XMMS works fine, but other apps (flashplayer,
bzflag) sound weird like the frequency has been shifted up 2 octaves,
and there is also distortion and clipping.
ECS worked fine for me with linux.....Windows is another story....and
ECS support is a royal pain.....
The A7N8X-E Deluxe looks like it can handle two DDR 400 256 for that
doubled speed thing, which sounds good to me. I don't really care too
much about AGP8x or anything, since it'll be a server, not a desktop game
machine.
You will not see a speed increase by using DDR400 with a 333MHz FSB
Athlon CPU. It may even be slower than DDR333 (PC2700). Using
'dual-channel' memory will definitely be faster (almost 50% faster in my
case).