Motherboards

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Quu
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Motherboards

Post by Quu » Mon Apr 07, 2003 2:22 pm

what is the most stable modern motherboard...

the only caveat is it must have built in USB 2.0

would it be a 845GE based pentium 4 celleron
or maybe a KT333A based athealon

I am not looking for best performance... since all the CPU will be doing is running the operating system.... dedicated hardware will handle all playback, and hardware raid cards will do the subsystsm

I am looking for stable, cool, and usb 2.0 (firewire would be a nice bonus... but not critical)
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mckeed
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Post by mckeed » Mon Apr 07, 2003 2:56 pm

check toms hardware.....there were some reviews of mb's with integrated usb 2.0 and firewire plus lots of other stuff....they are new and athlon based/DDR, so they are expensive. Probally not what you are looking for. But take a look.

I never really thought about a motherboard itself being unstable. How would you be able to tell if its a bad motherboard or a bad program or bad OS?
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Quu
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Post by Quu » Mon Apr 07, 2003 4:10 pm

i ken tell a bad motherboard by how often a new bios update comes out and how it fairs at a con... when being used in a hot room for hours on end...

i think that is why i am leaning twords a celeron for this... since they run nice and cool
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mckeed
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Post by mckeed » Mon Apr 07, 2003 9:17 pm

yeah....though a 533 celeron that i put in my server runs hotter than my pentium III 600 slot 1....go figure.
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AbsoluteDestiny
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Post by AbsoluteDestiny » Tue Apr 08, 2003 2:05 am

Anandtech is the place for motherboard reviews - and they do stress tests on all their motherboards:

for usb2 845GE based, see this:

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1725&p=5

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jbone
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Post by jbone » Tue Apr 08, 2003 7:22 am

Dammit, Dave and Ian, you stole my suggestions. :cry:
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dwchang
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Post by dwchang » Tue Apr 08, 2003 10:35 am

Quu wrote:i ken tell a bad motherboard by how often a new bios update comes out and how it fairs at a con... when being used in a hot room for hours on end...

i think that is why i am leaning twords a celeron for this... since they run nice and cool
Now of course I'm gonna be fairly bias working at AMD and would definitely suggest an AMD product, however, if given only the choice of an Intel Product, I would definitely stay clear of the Celeron. The Celeron is well...to be honest, a piece of crap. It's really cheap, but you pay for what you get. If you buy an Intel chip, I'd strongly suggest the Pentium III. It's architecture if superior to the Celeron (and Pentium IV for that matter), it runs at a lower voltage and it's cool.

Now if you want an AMD product well...we can talk more :) :) :)
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FurryCurry
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Post by FurryCurry » Tue Apr 08, 2003 3:42 pm

A few peanut gallery comments here:

The Celeron is crap. These days, the Celeron is nothing more than a cache-crippled P4, and not worth your time or interest.

While the KT333 and KT400 are the best, most stable chipsets VIA has yet produced, they still have some issues with PCI bus throughput, which is possibly a critical factor for you, since it sounds like you will be using a dedicated video processing PCI card to do most of the work. Intel's implementation of the PCI and AGP standards is just plain better than VIA's, and you will likely get better PCI transfer speeds, and better stability as the PCI bus approches saturation with the Intel chipset. (Note that this is no fault of AMD, it's just the way things are, with VIA being the supplier of the majority of AMD compatible chipsets)

The P4 also excels at handling streaming data types like video, and has better heat related failsafes in hardware (again, quite possibly the fault of the chipset maker)

ANY up to date mobo chipset/processor is going to run somewhat hot, and a case with excellent cooling (like Coolermaster) and a really good PSU like an Antec Smart Power 550 is the best defense.

If you really want an up-to-date system, I'd suggest investigating mobos based on Intel's new 7205 (Granite Bay) chipset. They are still pricey, but all I've seen feature at least 6 USB 2 ports, onboard gigabit ethernet, and most have forward-looking features like Serial ATA/RAID options. They also feature dual channel DDR memory, which is supposedly significantly faster than single channel DDR, although the benefits currently seem minor at best. If that seems excessive, then I'd recommend an 845 based system.

I do most of my computing on this KT333/AXP2200 system, as it handles the large amount of multitasking I do beautifully, but I do my editing on an i850/P4 2.53/RAMBUS based system, and it noticably spanks the Athlon when using vdub, etc.
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AbsoluteDestiny
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Post by AbsoluteDestiny » Tue Apr 08, 2003 3:55 pm

Remember the focus here is stability and usb2 compatibility not whether an individual processor is good or not.

Although I'm an AMD fan, I can't recommend either via or nvidia for motherboard solutions when absolute stability is the key. VIA have improved but they still have issues (and regular software updates, which is also something that isn't wanted) and the nforce2 boards... well, can anyone say the magic words "bios corruption"?

As for other AMD chipsets of note... well, there aren't any on a consumer level really (bar some nice dual boards but again stability has to be key)

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AbsoluteDestiny
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Post by AbsoluteDestiny » Tue Apr 08, 2003 3:59 pm

To reiterate:

Remember all the actual operations that this machine will do will be hardware so the processor speed really isnt important at all. Nor is memory speed - it's all about a stable usb2 motherboard cpu combo.

Chilliness is a good prerequisite for stability, hence the intel chipset and a slowish celeron.

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