Hi everybody, I decided to buy new motherboard into my home comp, but I remember there were problems mentioned here on HA forums with VIA chipset and Win2k. So my question is: which motherboard would be most suitable for Athlon XP2200+? The OS would be WinXP SP1 (ENG). I have Sound Blaster Live Platinum, so I would prefer maybe the motherboard without sound on it. The other piece of hardware is ATI Rage 128 Pro with hardware accelerator for playing DVD videos, but this can be easily changed; I just want to retain the Platinum soundcard.

Thanx in advance for any advice.

EDIT: The motherboard should be in ATX format...

I would recommend, in no particluar order:

Abit NF7 V2.0

Asus A7N8X-X

Both are nForce2 boards. Both have on board 6 channel audio that you can disable, but you're not paying the extra for the SoundStorm that you're not going to use.

abit, asus, msi all make exellent stable motherboards


read review on a board you like before you buy so you know it has all the features you want

I totally agree with that.

I myself would recommend the allmighty
!!Asus A7N8X 2.0!! (the non-deluxe version)

I just bouht a new computer with the Asus m/b, it's rockstable and quite speedy, and quiet cause of passive northbridge-cooling. Surly a good catch, though MSI is also realy good.

(edit: spelling)

Well, I would not recommend nForce2-based motherboards at the time being when stability is your major issue ... I bought an EpoX RDA3+ which was fast but totally unreliable and unstable (it always froze my system under high CPU load) ... I changed it for an ABIT NF7S V2.0 which runs smooth by now ...

The nVidia Chipset drivers are not that optimised (they removed their IDE driver from the latest release) and some boards still have stability problems ...

The MSI Ultra 745 I had before was an excellent board, regarding price and performance (it used the SiS 745 chipset - I did not want to go for a VIA based board ) ... onboard sound could be turned off and did not interfere at all with my EWX 2496 ...

An nForce2-based board... Abit should be a good choice.

Chipset comparison

Tom's hardware on several nForce2 Ultra 400 boards

I guess this problem could also be the fault of the cpu... or if it's the m/b, only this particular unit may have been faulty.
Based on that, and given my persoanl experiences plus all theese real good revies around (thg etc.), I would HIGHLY recommend nforce2 m/b. They're stable and fast. Especially the Asus boards, but also MSI and Gigabyte.

That may be an issue though, didn't do any research. At least I have no problems.

Asus A7N8X Deluxe revision 2.0 board here, rock solid with my 2500+ Barton core cpu running at 3200+ speed (200MHz fsb and mem clocks instead of 166) and core voltage at 1.70v instead of stock 1.65v

<edit> retail box cpu using supplied heatsink, but swapped the fan for a 7000rpm Delta, sitting at 38C at the moment, 25C case temp, 22C ambient

What kind of price range are you looking at, and most importantly, what are the most demanding applications that you think you will run on this system?

For budget systems, the single-channel NForce2 boards like the Soltek NV400-L64 maintain literally 90-99% of the performance of the more expensive dual-channel NF2 boards in all but certain workstation apps (SPEC) for significantly less money. Also, this performance level only requires a single DIMM to attain (whereas most NForce2 boards require two matched DIMMs for max performance), reducing total costs even further.
The NV400-L64 is $76 with free shipping at the reliable retailer newegg.com, if you live in the US.

Also note that the previously recommended Asus A7N8X-X board is a single channel NF2-400 board as well, and runs about $8 more than the Soltek on newegg. Both use the same, relatively passable Realtek ALC650 CODEC for 6-channel audio out. Neither is capable of Dolby Digital encoding. The Soltek uses the Nvidia LAN while the Asus uses the Realtek variant.



The newer Via chipsets get a bad rap IMO, most of it carrying over from the older Southbridge. Also, Via usually takes the blame for Creative Labs' inability to build certain sound cards cards within PCI 2.1/2.2 specifications.
The box I'm writing this on is a Via KT400 (Shuttle) system running Windows2000 SP4 - no stability or compatibility problems whatsoever, it's on all the time.



I agree, the SIS athlon chipsets have been very good, although the ECS boards they usually appear on tend to use the cheapest possible parts (two-phase power is no longer acceptable).
edit - added clarification

Thanx everybody for contributing in this thread!