Hmmm How do I choose?

The B.A.

The B.A.

The B.A.

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Looking for some advice on a motherboard for an AMD +3800 x2 as this is a bit of a dark art for me... Budget is around £80 max, never overclocked before but having read some of the posts on this chip I will probably have a go, getting the OEM chip together with an Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro so I guess this limits the overclock as only using air cooling and this therefore governs the max volts I need out of the m-board (if I'm talking rubbish then please let me know). Going with an ATI grafix card so not interested in SLI, would consider crossfire but a bit concerned that it has not been around
long enough yet and I don't know if the performance is as good as, or reliable as, NForce 4.

Considering the following as a first pass:

Abit AT8 ATI RD480 Crossfire

Abit KN8 Ultra nForce4 Ultra

Asus A8R-MVP Crossfire

Gigabyte K8NF-9 nForce4

MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum nForce4 Ultra

BFG RNF4U nForce4 Ultra

Any feedback on the above would be appreciated as well as any thoughts on crossfire mobo's in terms of performance and/or reliability.

Cheers,

EDIT: Taken a couple out due to issues posted on these forums
 
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For that price, I think your best bet may be the Epox EP-9NPA+ Ultra for overclocking.

Jokester

Edit: You can only have 4 lines in your sig by the way.
 
Jokester said:
For that price, I think your best bet may be the Epox EP-9NPA+ Ultra for overclocking.

Jokester

Edit: You can only have 4 lines in your sig by the way.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the heads up on the sig dude, memo to self "must read rules next time" :rolleyes:

Have to say that when I first started to research this stuff the Epox was the board I favoured, at the time OcUK did em but were out of stock. After a while Epox were taken off the site for whatever reason. I have seen the board elsewhere but TBH I work about 600 yards from Overclockers so I was hoping to get all my kit off them :D

I am leaning towards the Abit KN8 Ultra at the moment but not sure how it clocks, next couple of hours should swing it one way or another....
 
Mikey1280 said:
Agreed, I have one myself :)
Click to expand...

Just seen one of these on "another" site, it seems that the bios they ship with doesn't support AMD Dual core and it has to be flashed with one from the EPOX site... Will the board fire up with the 3800 x2 in place to allow bios to be flashed?
 
According to the website it supports X2 up to 4800+, however this may be with a BIOS update. You should be able to flash the BIOS with a cd if the CPU comes up as 'unknown'.
 
Jokester said:
For that price, I think your best bet may be the Epox EP-9NPA+ Ultra for overclocking.

Jokester

Edit: You can only have 4 lines in your sig by the way.
Click to expand...

According to the spec;s this EPox board has a Max Bus Speed of 1000 MHz, is this ok with the 3800 X2 - I thought I had seen boards with 2000 MHz HT?
 
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