Motherboard question

[thymios 0]

I am planning to build a new system from scratch and i want opinions on Intel sckt370 motherboards.I don't really care about speed as long as it is steady and reliable, and has good UDMA-66/100 controller for the HD.

Thanks in advance

[BladeRunner 0]

I love the Intel motherboards for one reason - stability.

I've seen so very few Intel boards fail (Actually, last one was when I knocked a capacitor off it when being attacked by a nasty Heatsink/Fan combo!).

The BIOS on the Intel boards is idiot proof, by this I mean Intel get around the hassle of users changing settings they shouldn't by stopping you getting to half of them!!

 

Intel Motherboard Pro's:

 

Reliable

Well Made

 

Intel Motherboard Con's:

 

Intel boards will only ever appear 'half way' on speed comparrisons

They lock some BIOS features away from the user

Over-clocking with an Intel board is impossible.

 

Other alternatives in my eyes would be the ASUS CUSL-2 (Now TUSL-2 to support the new style P3's).

Nearly the same reliability, but you can get into the BIOS and tweak it.

[thymios 0]

from what i read and heared so fat 815 chipset of Intel is not that slow.I mean it's slower than VIA's Apollo Pro 2 but i really don't want to bother with VIA since a lot of users have problems.

That's when stability comes to light.What do i care if a m/board gives me some extra frames on games but it crashes and have compatibility problems all the time?

Any suggestions of other types of motherboards (including VIA) are always welcome!

Thanks for reading

[Brian Frank 0]

Well, yes it's a Via Apollo Pro 133A board, but the Tyan Trinity 400 is a very good board. Extremely stable, never had a problem with it, and the only reason I don't have it right now is because I went to a dual board. The only thing you need to be aware of is that Tyan does not make their boards to overclock, but that may not mean anything to you.

If you do want to OC, Abit is probably your safest bet, and they produce good boards too.

[BladeRunner 0]

Ah, no, I wasn't say the 815/E/EEA chipset was slow.

What I meant by '"Intel motherboards will only ever appear half way on speed comparrisons" is:

If you took 10 motherboards from various manufacturers, all sporting the Intel 815 chipset, the Intel manufactured motherboard would appear about half-way down the list on overall performance.

 

I use an 815EEA chipset based motherboard in the form of an ASUS CUSL2-C-Black Pearl and I find it anything but slow.