best athlon/DDR motherboard

[Thor006]

I am building a new athlon system and am stumped on what motherboard to buy. I'd like to have DDR, but no motherboard has really stood out to me yet. I would have liked to wait for the SiS 735, but I'm running out of time to wait for it. So I put it to you guys, what is the best athlon/DDR motherboard?

 

[big ron]

i have heard about this sis735...what do u know about it....and i was going to go for a ddr board...but i never found one so im at sdram land.....

 

[Thor006]

I read about the SiS 735 at toms hardware, it's supposed to be a really good performer, but I don't think there are any motherboards out that are based on it yet. Does anybody have a sigestion at what motherboard I should get for athlon/DDR? How bout one based on the AMD 760 chipset?

 

[craig]

Asus

 

[anarki_gr]

the asus a7m266 is a good choice.

 

[Valid]

The EPoX 8K7A. It's a breeze to install and configure. CPU multipliers are set through jumpers on the board itself (As are the voltage settings - CPU and RAM, I believe?). FSB is available through the BIOS, and with the shipped BIOS it supports up to 166mhz. I hear the latest BIOS update provides higher FSBs and support for 1/5 PCI. I believe it's still a beta though. So to recap, 6 PCI slots, 2 DDR DIMM slots (up to 1gig of PC1600/PC2100), 1 4x AGP slot, onboard sound (AC97 I believe), AMD761 northbridge and VIA 686B southbridge. I'm not sure how heat sink installation is with this board, but my Swiftech fits fine. That's about all the information I can remember off the top of my head. If you need more and are too lazy to look on the web, I'll get my manual. Just drop me a line.

 

[badgers]

a 1/5 PCI divider!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I have always wondered why someone did not give us better dividers for the PCI and AGP.

PS does it have a better divider for the AGP bus?

 

[Gekko]

No...unfortunatly they didnt go with a better agp divider...the fsb can goto like 266 though...even though you can't really go anywhere near that high. For my money the epox 8k7a is the best. I was waiting for kg7 but got this instead and am not a bit dissapointed. By the way...if you have 8k7a+(like me) don't get the beta bios...wont work with raid yet.

Mark

 

[Paul -The Mad Hatter]

Yeah thats right badger 1/5th pci divider!

People w/ the new bios have gotten as high as 190 fsb. I bet the board could get near 200 if there was ram that coild do it. (not too mention some good cooling on the northbridge.)

 

[Da Whip]

Here is a link to the latest bios update for the Epox 8K7A from Taiwan, that has the 1/5 PCI divider. They are not real sure if it works.

Welcome Aboard!