At 09:42 PM 11/29/2004, you wrote:
>I seem to have lost touch! There used to be articles comparing motherboards
>so as to make a decision. Now I find that Anandtech and others seem to have
>a lot of reviews of individual boards, but not a comparison to narrow down
>the search. My need is for a stable, good performing, desktop system. I
>don't want to pay top dollar for the "latest and greatest", but am willing
>to pay for good quality that performs well.

Hi Peter,

There are SOOOO many motherboards on the market now, it would be a
monumental task to come up with a real buying guide. I can just go by what
I have built recently.

My personal system is an Asus P4P800-E Dlx. I really like this because I
like to overclock and play with the settings. I have a P4 2.8E (Prescott)
overclocked to 3.2G. The mobo has two SATA RAID controllers (Intel and
Promise), firewire, plenty of USB, onboard Gb LAN, etc.

On a more economical note, I used to be a diehard Intel fan, but my brother
in law wanted a couple reliable low cost systems, and I have played a
little with an AMD Athlon MP based system at work, so I decided to try an
AMD Sempron 3100+ based system. I think AMD has a winner in the platform.
It is fairly low cost, but it screams. The 3100+ is a departure from
previous Semprons, it is based on the Paris/Newcastle core used for the
Athlon 64, only the 64 bit extensions are disabled. It supports the
HyperTransport memory architecture and is clocked at a fairly low rate
(1.8Ghz) for what the core is capable of, so there is lots of headroom.
There are a couple reviews that have this CPU overclocked by 50% and
completely stable! It runs very cool, so you don't really need any case
fans either.

In some benchmarks, it outperforms the Athlon 64 3200+ and P4 3.2G, and
isn't too far behind in many other benchmarks.

I think I would still stick with Intel for my heavy duty video type stuff,
but for a low cost general purpose system, the AMD is hard to beat.



Russ Poffenberger
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