Socket A mobo advice

Jez

Jez

Caporegime
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
33,073
Hi,

A friend of mine has an XP3200+ Socket A chip, and needs a board for it asap as his old one has died!

Any manufacturer will do so long as it supports socket A and 200mhz(400)FSB, any recommendations as to boards which are still available? Second hand or anything is fine.

Looking for model numbers of boards available obviously, due to the no competitor rule :)

Thanks HUGELY for any advice!
 
ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe or Abit NF7-S V2
best Socket A boards, might struggle to find either still being sold though. They both have Soundstorm, which is slightly better than an Audigy and has realtime Dolby Digital decoding.
 
Epox 8RDA6+ Pro. Awesome Socket A board with many features from NForce 3/4 such as the firewall, nvRAID, USB/Firewire/SP-DIF, etc.
 
Ateapotist said:
ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe or Abit NF7-S V2
best Socket A boards, might struggle to find either still being sold though. They both have Soundstorm, which is slightly better than an Audigy and has realtime Dolby Digital decoding.

Erm, i have the former board and the sound is noway better than the audigy? What makes you say that chap?
 
As the guys say here, any nForce2 based mobo will do the trick. If you look hard enough there are a few still knocking about, as you already know OcUK dont stock SocketA mobo anymore.

ManC
 
greenlizard0 said:
Erm, i have the former board and the sound is noway better than the audigy? What makes you say that chap?
Well at the time (going back a couple of years now) most of the reviews I read said the soundstorm was better than an Audigy, but not as good as an Audigy 2. I've never compared the 2 side by side, so it's difficult to say.

I do know that soundstorm was better than pretty much any other onboard audio before or since. Especially in terms of CPU usage.
The dolby digital decoding was a nice feature as well as only the recent X-fi cards do that afaik.
 
DFI were the only ones that would go upto 250fsb out of the box but NF7 is a good choice also
 
Another vote for the NF7s v2. Rock solid board that did me well! One of the best boards I've owned apart from this Ultra D, lots of options in the bios as well to play with.
 
Yup the NF7 was a good board, I was running one for a time. Also the Gygabyte GA7N-400 Pro 2 is an amazing board if you can find one :)
 
Can't say I'd recommend the A7N8X-E deluxe. I've seen two of those boards suddenly die on me. One minute they're working, then you switch them on and get nothing but the sound of a few fans spinning.The asus after sales service is somewhat lacking too. I never got anywhere with the ******s.

NF7s v2 gets my vote, if you can find one.
 
nf7-s v2 gets another vote from me

tough as nails ans MASSES of custom bioses etc out there.

only thing to watch is the voltage through the chipset- if you get memtest errors but the memory is fine (on test 5 i think i had), then whack the chipset voltage to max and leave it there...it will fix the problem and you wont have any more trouble.

make sure you get a relatively recent bios, as the original bios had sata corruption issues.

TG
 
Nf7 is the one.But dont kid about the sound.Its not that its not great, its okay. but not as good as an audighy really.Especially cos an audighy would take the load off the cpu somewhat.Only in the vague term of having spidf out,was it really good.
 
BS Dave said:
Can't say I'd recommend the A7N8X-E deluxe. I've seen two of those boards suddenly die on me....
NF7s v2 gets my vote, if you can find one.

Totally agree. I have just replaced my dead A7N8X-E. One night working fine, next morning dead. Its my 3rd and last Asus board. Great for some I guess but I have had nothing but trouble from this brand.

Oh the joy of plugging in a DFI and just sitting back and watching it reconfigure itself with both hardrives with seprate OS's. Unbelievable, not a single conflict. I know I should reformat and replace the OS but as yet there seems no reason to.

Don't buy the Asus!
 
Si MPS said:
I had an AN7 that was essentially a tricked-out NF7-S, but the NF7-S was better at OC'ing.

Managed to lay my hands on the AN7 as the nF7-S aint around anymore... in what way is the nF7-s better at overlclocking then then AN7?

I intend to put a AMD mobile XP2500+ & GeiL Value 3200 which should allow me to run at XP3000+ speed... should'nt it?



Thx.

ManC
 
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