AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (San Diego) - good mobo?

[martianrobot]

Sorry I did a naughty before and the mod had to delete my post. This one should be safe.

I've got an AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (San Diego) winging its way to me and I was wondering if anyone could recommend a good inexpensive motherboard & memory to go with this, preferably a mobo that has AGP as I have an X800XT-PE lying around that needs a home... and if OcUK sell it, even better!

Not looking for the fastest or freakiest, just a good solid mobo that will just work... if it also has Firewire then that's a bonus too.

Cheers.

 

[martianrobot]

ASRock Dual SATA-2 is an excellent cheap board and has both AGP and PCI-E slots, giving you a good oppourtunity to go PCI-E in the future.

RAM wise 2x1Gb is the way to go if you can afford it, Geil Value and GSkill ZX are excellent choices.

I've had several ASRocks in the past, for mine and friends systems, and always been happy.

I did look at an ECS board that had AGP & PCI-E but I read a review that said the AGP is dodgy, being linked to the PCI bus so it would only accept older 3.3v cards.

Is that not so with this Asrock?

 

[martianrobot]

I've been looking into this mobo, and it's even better than you all say - as well as having AGP & PCI-E, it's also X2 Dual Core compatible, AND you can even get an add-in board that allows you to use new AM2 CPU'S!!!

Only thing missing is Firewire, but add-in cards are cheap.

 

[martianrobot]

You have yourself a bargain upgrade, congrats

Can't believe you can such a mobo & cpu combination for a couple of quid over a ton!

 

[martianrobot]

Hang on, I uust thought about this....

The AM2 cpus are only different in that they increase the memory bandwidth and allow access to the faster DDR2 memory modules.

The Asrock mobo expansion board allows you to add an AM2 cpu, yet the mobo only has a stated memory support of up to DDR400 ... will the expansion board allow you to properly use DDR2 memory?

 

[martianrobot]

The expansion board has DDR2 slots on it.

http://www.ocworkbench.com/2006/asrock/AM2 CPU Board/g1.htm

Well, that sorts that one out.... but I bet you can't get hold of one of these for love nor money though!

 

[martianrobot]

I'd hold of on buying anything else until you get the email about the pricing error on that CPU you have allocated as you might not want to go ahead with it at it's revised price.

Hmmm... you might be right. Strangely enough, Athlon 64 4000+ have disappeared from their online catalogue.

 

[martianrobot]

You're best giving the shop a ring in the morning to check

Got an email from them saying that there was a pricing error and it's actually almost twice what it was, but if I want to go ahead I should contact them. Strangely though it's now showing as being almost four times the price I was going to pay and out of stock!

I think I'll give it a miss... only went for it as it seemed like the bargain of the century. As I said in my original post that got deleted, I was only casually toying with the idea of building a new gaming rig. I think I'll wait until the X2 dual core processor prices come down, or until the new Conroe chips have proven their worth. Always been an AMD man but the word is these new Intels are pretty hot!