looking to upgrade my mobo...again -_-

well Ive come to find a problem with my current board as not having the features i will need for future upgrades. so im looking for a new board. Ive got an XP2500 Barton (w/o locked multi). 512 of Mushkin 3500 black 2 (2*256) and like half dozen hard drives. and currently on an Abit NF7-S nforce 2 board.

Looking for a board that will have decent options for bus speed and multipliers for proc (so I can run faster FSB to get more from my RAM w/o much OC of proc). will need 4 RAM slots (dual channelsupport would be a plus but not required). needs onboard SATA connectors (main drives are two 80gig SATA). and 6.1 channel (or better) sound. other than that its open for most anything. Might be upgrading to an XP3000 or greater sometime in the future too. So all help/suggestions are appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Also open to suggestion of AMD 64 if they are worth thier price but I wont afford that for a little while.

a quick search on newegg came up with this board is this one any good? looks like it fits almost all of my needs except for sound (channels) but that can be fixed w/o much trouble.

if u are looking for high end fsb u must go with dfi lanparty b(240+)
xp 3000 dont worth his price and also it maybe locked better way to go with 2500+ mobile or 2600+ they overclock much better than the xp 3000
pc 4000 ram
it also to not that a64 is better but i think that it not worth the prize

let me clarify I dont really overclock at the moment, what i do is turn the multi down and FSB up to take better advantage of the higher speed mem I have in this machine
its curently running @ 165*11 rather than the 133*12.5 or whatever it was. Im just looking for the tweakability thats close to my current board. and do oyu have a link to the dfi lanparty board?

Why not do a vdimm mod for your NF7?

because i need 4 ramm slots, the nfs only has 3

I have not seen any good NF2 MB with more than 3 DIMM slots, and you really should not run more than 2 sticks in an NF2 anyways.

You RAM is way over kill if you are just running 166fsb. I would advise you to sell it and purchase 2 sticks, totaling the amount of ram you need.

I don't think you will ever find an NF2 MB with 4 Dimm slots.

Prove me wrong though.

I do intend to sell my RAM, why I have it was I got a smokin' deal on it form a local shop. and im not looking for a NF2 board(well I dont think so anyways). Just something that meets those three requirements I stated above. I will be going from 2*256 of PC3500 to 4*512 of PC3000 based on the good kingston deal in cyber deals section. So nevermind on the thing about fsb all that, just want to get a small overclock out of the new board. And i sorta doubt the gigabyte will give that to me. so im interested in info on this DFi board.

Many of the Gigabyte NF2 board have 4 dimm slots.

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/MotherBoard/Products/Products_GA-7N400E.htm

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/MotherBoard/Products/Products_GA-7N400.htm

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/MotherBoard/Products/Products_GA-7N400-L1.htm

If you don't like Gigabyte, you will probably have to go with a Via chipset.

looking ovefr things i decided not to upgrade, just dont need that expense right now, thank you all for the help tho....... however, anyone know why pretty much all NF2 boards only have 3 ram slots instead of 4? i dont get this

pik4chu said:

looking ovefr things i decided not to upgrade, just dont need that expense right now, thank you all for the help tho....... however, anyone know why pretty much all NF2 boards only have 3 ram slots instead of 4? i dont get this

Click to expand...

They reall should only have 2 if you ask me.

The reason there are 3 is so you can run DC or SC with 2 sticks of RAM. 3 sticks were really not meant to be used together.

ya but why not 4? so you can go DC with 4 sticks. or just with two.