For your PC needsExt User(Sofa Slug)
04-10-2011, 10:29 PM
Hi -
I'm looking for a stable mainboard for an Athlon 64 3000+ Venice, Socket 939. I don't care about overclocking or games; this will be for web design work. I don't need firewire or SLI, either. I've been looking at SATA II, but only as a point for possible future upgrades.
From what I have read in different places, people seem to favor the NVIDIA nForce4 chipset (particularly the Ultra) over the Via for stability.
Except for their crappy North Bridge fans, I have heard that the Asus boards are very solid. I'm considering the A8N-E, but their website is awful; hokey forum, almost impossible to download manual/drivers, etc. BTW, I can't find a full review of this board anywhere.
Another candidate is the MSI K8N Neo4-F, and maybe it's higher end "Platinum" brother... both are well designed with lots of features for the $. MSI boards seem to be the reverse of Asus, though - questionable stability & Q/A, but GREAT online support.
The Gigabyte boards seem OK (I'm looking at the GA-K8NF-9), but several users have reported issues with the current Bios not always detecting PS/2 keyboards properly (I don't want to purchase a USB keyboard just to fix this).
Although the ABIT AN8 Ultra looks decent, I can still recall that not too distant debacle where some users tried to sue this company for leaking mainboard capacitors.
I would appreciate your comments & suggestions...
- S
I'm looking for a stable mainboard for an Athlon 64 3000+ Venice, Socket 939. I don't care about overclocking or games; this will be for web design work. I don't need firewire or SLI, either. I've been looking at SATA II, but only as a point for possible future upgrades.
From what I have read in different places, people seem to favor the NVIDIA nForce4 chipset (particularly the Ultra) over the Via for stability.
Except for their crappy North Bridge fans, I have heard that the Asus boards are very solid. I'm considering the A8N-E, but their website is awful; hokey forum, almost impossible to download manual/drivers, etc. BTW, I can't find a full review of this board anywhere.
Another candidate is the MSI K8N Neo4-F, and maybe it's higher end "Platinum" brother... both are well designed with lots of features for the $. MSI boards seem to be the reverse of Asus, though - questionable stability & Q/A, but GREAT online support.
The Gigabyte boards seem OK (I'm looking at the GA-K8NF-9), but several users have reported issues with the current Bios not always detecting PS/2 keyboards properly (I don't want to purchase a USB keyboard just to fix this).
Although the ABIT AN8 Ultra looks decent, I can still recall that not too distant debacle where some users tried to sue this company for leaking mainboard capacitors.
I would appreciate your comments & suggestions...
- S