Gonna upgrade to a DDR board for my Athlon XP advice needed

[jackzod]

I'm gonna upgrade soon to a ddr board for my AthlonXP, I did some research on the net , but I would like input from end-users, since the review site often "omit" some flaws, especially when talkin about big manufacturer (Anand and Asus...etc...).

Presently I'm leaning toward an Epox 8KHA+ or a Soltek board, the SOYO is appealing but cost so much around here, it would have to really stand over the other.

What's bugging me is that I would like to get rid of VIA (VIA will be the downfall of AMD eventually I guess...) but there seems to be no good alternatives.. Anybody with and AMD chipset board around ? (even those board have a VIA southbridge tough...)

P.S. 6 PCI slot would be appreciated as I have a lot of stuff on PCI...

Thanks

[Taz]

Well there is the Iwill XP333-R which uses the newer C stepping of the ALi Magik 1 chipset. With a bit of tweaking you can get memory scores on par with the KT266A boards out of it

[The PIT]

I like the epox it seems one of the more reliable via chipsets solutions around. if you wait a little bit theres a raid version on the way. However if thats based on the buggy high point I wouldn't bother.

[Dilitante1]

my opinion is to get the Tyan Tiger MP and avoid the "hidden issues" you fear....little more than the other boards you listed, but stability is there and once Uncle Sam sends my refund, I'll get one



-pickle

[Grail]

Recommended boards

You can't go wrong with either the Epox 8KHA+ or Soltek 75DRV2 motherboard. Personally, I would go for the Epox board over the Soltek board.
The Epox board was fairly easy to install, trouble free upgrade I did for my roommate. He didn't even reformat windows after that install(still waiting to see if it survives). My brother (another roommate) even tried to break that motherboard, but could only get the HD(WD 10gig) to stop working. I believe he got it up to 200mhz FSB(would only post) with the latest beta BIOS. BTW, the ram used in testing was the Corsair XMS2400.
As for my brother's system, he uses a Soyo Dragon+ motherboard. So far, he has nothing to complain about it except for the fact that he can't OC past 145mhz FSB. The onboard stuff even works quite well with most hardware out there. Only problems I have found with the onboard sound was with using a Radeon AIW 8500DV not liking it being a "3/4 duplex soundcard" in some applications. Apparently, some applications only sees it as half duplex(ATI videocapture software immediately comes to mind). There are work-arounds, but none that are good.

[Wombat]

Epox is a top-notch manufacturer. They'll have to really mess something up big time to lose me as a customer.

Also, the IWill board may be an option for you, but it depends on what you'll use the system for. I just read about that board. The memory speeds can be brought up, but the IDE speeds are slower than the other guys. ALi doesn't seem to have a speed demon for a south bridge.

[isochar]

Originally posted by Dilitante1
my opinion is to get the Tyan Tiger MP and avoid the "hidden issues" you fear....little more than the other boards you listed, but stability is there and once Uncle Sam sends my refund, I'll get one



-pickle

Don't kid yourself. That board is FAR from a stable solution, even using that latest 3A revision.

[rubank]

- 2c -

I´m running the Soltek sl75drv2 since a few months. Couldn´t be happier, no issues whatsoever.

Very high scores i Sandra mem/cpu tests. Very tweakable if you´re into that. But of course, you don´t get RAID if that´s of interest to you.

If price is a matter you can´t get a better deal.

rubank

[Wombat]

The same review about the Iwill also talked about the Soltek. The reason it's winning benchmarks is because its 133MHz setting actually runs at 134.(5|7)MHz. It may be a good board otherwise, just keeping you advised.

I tried to find the article, but amdzone doesn't keep good link archives.

[jackzod]

Thanks for the reply.

Well I don't feel like overclocking anymore (too much assle if you ask me when you have those Athlon Xp, don't need to squeeze 3 fps and have to get a full cooling system for it, altough I might triy to raidse the bus a little...).
So what I need is board stable and which performs well at normal clock rate.
Epox seems to be a good solution right now, since it has 6 pci slot (which I need if possible).

does this board have the latency issue too ?
And also I'm hearing a lot about this SIS745 chipset, but can't find any benchmark of it, anybody got a link ?

[Lucid]

VIA seems to have problems with some USB devices, I could not get a scanner to work reliably..

Also I had to apply a 3rd party PCI latency patch (from www.viahardware.com) to get rid off buzzing/crackling with an SB Live! card.

Otherwise the Epox 8KHA+ has been good and stable.

[The PIT]

Usb works and crackling and no patch installed on my epoxs motherboards. Creative cards in both.

[RichL]

I'm quite happy with my Epox (not DDR) mobo, which ran quite reliably until recently when something (probably my CPU) decided it had had enough of running at 45% above its rated FSB speed - I havent had the time to fully diagnose it yet, I just wound the FSB down until it would boot again. The onboard diagnostic LED display was quite useful!

There's a review in this months PC Pro magazine of Athlon mobos, and they rate the Soyo K7V Dragon Plus! as being the dogs danglies.
Its a Via KT266a chipset with an AGP Pro slot, six channel sound, Promise RAID controller and Via 10/100 ethernet onboard, plus a smartcard reader.

It has purple PCI slots too, which I'm reliably informed are worth another 10bhp when properly tuned

Edit - The Soyo only has 5 PCI slots.

[Schorsch]

Originally posted by jackzod

And also I'm hearing a lot about this SIS745 chipset, but can't find any benchmark of it, anybody got a link ?

The first benchmark scores of the SiS745-based ECS K7S6A are surfacing on the Web. Some of them can be found here (it's in German, though):

http://www.planet3dnow.de/vbulletin/showthread.php3?s=&threadid=30394

The SiS 745 seems to be at least as fast as the KT266A, and it seems there will be more motherboards with the SiS745 than we saw with the SiS735. Epox, Abit, MSI and others will be producing SiS745-Boards and if I had the intention of buying a new Athlon motherboard, I'd probably get one of these...