Current AMD motherboards

mrbios

mrbios

mrbios

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I'm doing some product research for work, we need to replace between 31 and 93 PCs in the summer to replace our dog awful and dieing foxconn/pentium D combos....

Now ever since the core2duo range was released and athlon64 became a think of the past I've always used intel both for home and work due to what i base purely on personal experience as a far more reliable chipset. Put simply SiS and VIA have never been anything but trouble in my work environment.

So my question is this: what are the current AMD chipsets like for reliability? What's the most common network chip to find on these boards? (marvell yukon and SiS are a big big big big no no for me) and are the drivers relativly bug free and stable?

Thanks to anyone who can help me out with this :)
 
Are you replacing whole systems with new branded ones or just replacing boards/cpus?

Most AMD boards are pretty reliable these days so I wouldn't worry on that front. If you are buying Dell or HP you are probably looking at some kind of broadcom lan chip, if you are looking at whitebox or just boards most use some kind of Realtek PCI-E gigabit solution so 8111D/8111E, with some board partners going with Atheros.
 
We'll be buying the parts and building them ourselves so we have a selection of boards, the realtek and atheros ones should be ok(not 100% sure on atheros)

Do you know which boards...preferably cheap and microATX with onboard graphics etc use a realtek chip?
 
MY Motherboard, has onboard graphics/sound , AM3 Support, and an Nvidia (!) Network controller. I've had 0 problems with it so far.

Name is in Sig.

They currently retail for around £35 a piece i think. Might be worth considering :)
 
Jamiman said:
MY Motherboard, has onboard graphics/sound , AM3 Support, and an Nvidia (!) Network controller. I've had 0 problems with it so far.

Name is in Sig.

They currently retail for around £35 a piece i think. Might be worth considering :)
Click to expand...

Sadly nvidia network controllers come under the same catagory as SiS and marvel yukon for our uses, which is a pitty as i quite liked them back in the day of the nforce 2 (i think that's the chipset) motherboards.

The most reliable are intel (which i guess wouldn't ever be featured on an amd motherboard :p) and realtek, so ideally im aiming for a board with a realtek chip
 
I have another question to add...what's the head output of the Athlon II X4 CPUs like, specifically in comparison to the radiators that are the pentium Ds? Should probably start another thread in CPUs but seeing as this is here...
 
mrbios said:
I have another question to add...what's the head output of the Athlon II X4 CPUs like, specifically in comparison to the radiators that are the pentium Ds? Should probably start another thread in CPUs but seeing as this is here...
Click to expand...

Well, i'm on stock cooling, idleing at 26C and Maxing at around 45C. Fan-wise, i have a 220mm input, along with a front mounted 120mm.

At rear, i have a 92mm, and my PSU has 3 fans on it.

So nothing that will cook your lunch there :)

Also, my G-Card diesn't help, it idles at 60C :P I know after an hour or so of dirt, it can hit 80C, and then it's quite warm in there. But for idle browsing, it's nice and chilly :P
 
Gigabyte GA-880GM-UD2H user here with an Athlon x4 640 not used the stock heatsink so cannot comment on that but with my Freezer 7 Pro v2 it idles at 19-26oC depending on room temp and has never reached 60oC even when overclocked to 3.6Ghz amd burning 4 cores on prime for 12hrs straight!

The Gigabyte board is Awesome! Includes RealteK Network and sound and on board ATI 4200 (uses shared system ram)

Excellent board and CPU combo :)
 
AMD AM3 platform is rock solid and for the price, you cant go wrong. You can pick up a board with onboard VGA, dual-core CPU and set of 4GB DDR3 RAM for/less than £150.

At the back end of last year I had to help replace some corporate Pentium 4 systems, about 25 systems in all. We decided to migrate to the Athlon II CPU - we wanted a platform that was cheap and robust and AM3 with the Athlon II chip fitted that best. I think Athlon II and lower-end Phenom II is definitely a strong contender when pitted to the i3 and i5 line of chips.

I am running a Phenom II 955BE @ 3.8GHz on a ASUS Crosshair Formula IV, not your cheap upgrade I agree but the performance and stability is solid. even then, my AM2 board (ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe) got me through three generations of CPU's (Athlon 64 X2 4600+ / Athlon 64 X2 6400+ / Phenom I 9850 and Phneom II 955) until I was forced to upgrade simply because it was outdated.
 
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