Best socket A motherboard

Vonhelmet

Vonhelmet

Vonhelmet

Caporegime
Joined
28 Jun 2005
Posts
48,104
Location
On the hoods
I'm transferring my socket A rig from a SFF system to a tower, so I'm looking for a decent motherboard for it. I'll be getting it second hand from somewhere, so costs will be low, so I'm just looking for guidance on which the best ones to look out for are.

I gather that the Asus A7N8X-E and the Abit NF7-S are very good. Any thoughts on these, or any others that I should look for?

Cheers guys.
 
Anything you can get would be good, as socket A boards are hard to find these days.
We have had a couple of threads on this, and the ABIT is a damn good board, but in short supply.
 
DoubleCheese said:
Abit NF7 or NF7-S
Epox 8RDA3+
Click to expand...

DFI Infinity NF2 or DFI LanParty NF2 (same boards essentially, the latter of the two has Gigabit Ethernet and SATA) are my favourite Socket A boards for air cooling, due to their high Vdimm and out of the box high FSB hitting capabilities.

NF7-S Rev2.0 would be my pick for watercooling though due it having a much better than Vcore than the DFI's (which top out around 1.85V).

Not a fan of Abit boards, they're fine for light overclocking, but tend to give up at a pretty mediocre FSB.
 
I've hit high speeds on my NF7-S. By that I mean 250+ MHz.

Look out for the Soltek NF2 boards. I forget their name now, they were never that popular. But a lot of them hit as high as 250 MHz FSB. Only issue with them was the lack of mounting holes for some of the fancier heatsinks.
 
You had no luck with six of them? Sure it wasn't the rest of your hardware or some sort of problem with your overclocking process?

Most people who have had both prefer the NF7-S. It was just that bit more refined, more stable, better support and fewer issues. On average it didn't get as high on the FSB, but it would generally give higher CPU overclocks. And the thing with high FSB was that it wasn't as efficient as the NF7.

I had a decent NF7-S so got both high FSB and high CPU. And without any cold boot issues. The NF7-S is one of the greatest motherboards of all time.
 
i love my nf7-s
only downside is the northbridge fan that insists on dying but that can be replaced with a passive zalman heatsink for under a fiver
my only regret is i dont have an unlocked multi to fully test its limits
 
Biggles 266 said:
You had no luck with six of them? Sure it wasn't the rest of your hardware or some sort of problem with your overclocking process?

Most people who have had both prefer the NF7-S. It was just that bit more refined, more stable, better support and fewer issues. On average it didn't get as high on the FSB, but it would generally give higher CPU overclocks. And the thing with high FSB was that it wasn't as efficient as the NF7.

I had a decent NF7-S so got both high FSB and high CPU. And without any cold boot issues. The NF7-S is one of the greatest motherboards of all time.
Click to expand...

i got ~230fsb on one, which was ok till i did something else in the bios and then it wouldnt go that high anymore and eventually got stuck at 200fsb. others did 199/200fsb max and a couple more did ~215max.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom