Im building/upgrading my computer.

[Dobro]

I am thinking about using an ASUS motherboard and chip set for a Pentium IV. Does anyone know anything about ASUS? They used to be a very reliable motherboard/chipset to use. Has that changed? Does anyone know of other reliable motherboard/CPU combos that are worth checking into?

Thank you in advance

[Menkure]

I have used Asus motherboards since my first homebuilt system.. an ATX mainboard with a P 233 w/MMX technology..

They have been extremely reliable with one exception and that, not suprisingly, has to do with Horizons.

On my A7V8X motherboard, Horizons will lock up the system with a memory call that is out of range.. the game actually tries to read from an address that is in the AGP aperture. This causes the the entire system to 'lock up'.. or slow down, with the screen flickering, and the entire world, or the terrain 'disappearing', with the exception of models.

http://www.planetquake.com/teamreact...sus_lockup.jpg

Because the computer is locked up, the only way to get out of it is to manually reset. These crashes happen anywhere from frequently to infrequently.. sometimes I get them as many as 3 times a day, or it goes months without a lockup.

Artifact Tech Support reported to me that the lockups are caused by the 'A7' line of motherboards, and the dev I talked to said he had this same motherboard and 'got rid of it cause of the memory handling issues'. I have one other friend who has another board from the 'A7' line and she has similar lockups from time to time.


On the NEW system that I built, which utilizes a K8VSE Deluxe motherboard with 1.5 gigs DDR400 ram and an Athlon64 3000+, I have noticed absolutely no instability or lockups.. this leads me to believe that the lockups I had with the previous board may have been truly related to that particular brand of VIA chipset.

Those are my two personal experiences with ASUS and Horizons.. as for the ASUS brand of motherboards, I am very happy with the K8VSE.. it is hands down far better than the older one.

-Menkure

[Rauglothgor]

This is interesting because I experience an identical system lockup that happens chiefly with Horizons, but I didn't think it was a motherboard issue. See, I had been playing Horizons on the same settings from day one, until one day I experienced the same issue where terrain textures would disappear, the screen would flicker, etc. The best I could come up with was it might be my video card from some unknown manufacturer. I found I could avoid it by drastically lowering my graphics settings for Horizons, but that's hardly the kind of solution I'd like to settle for. How would I go about finding my motherboard model to see if that's the case?

[Dobro]

I noticed that you use the Athalon processors and not the Pentium. Any specific reason?

[Menkure]

Rauglothgor: Almost next to impossible really without taking your computer apart and looking at the motherboard to see. However, the lockup seems specific to certain types of chipsets.. the motherboard I had used the KT400 chipset for the onboard controller, and I /think/ thatthe problemwaswith the K7 line of chips.

Dobro: I went with AMD back during the RAMBUS fiasco.. no way in h*ll was I gonna sell my first unborn child so I could get a decent amount of ram for my system. I haven't really looked back since, except for the KT400.. which really turned out to be a lemon.. but the new board is everything I expected and much more.

Right now, I don't see that much of a difference between Intel and AMD, with one offering hyperthreading, and the other offering 64bit processing.. and while both provide a boost in performace, neither are fully utilized at the software end to their full potential. 64bit processing helps with memory read-writes and theres a performance gain, but Windows operating systems are still 32bit processing based. We'll see a new verstion of Windows that will support 64bit processes and apps, but not till mid 2005.

What is important is what the mainboards provide as far as features, the cost between the two for those features.. and also what you are looking for in a system. For me, an AMD Athlon 64bit processor is nice, but it was not everything.. the number of ram slots.. support of DDR400 ram up to 2gigs, SATA and SATA raid.. Gigabit lan, and AGP8x were all factors in my decision with going with the new board.

Hope that helps some.

-Menkure

[Gilresk]

I've gone with Shuttle motherboards for my last two PCs and also recommended one to my friend. They don't have some of the greatest on-board audio, but it's not terrible, and if you want good audio, I prefer to just buy a good soundcard. The main one I'm using now is a AK39N. In general I have found their motherboards to be very stable. Also their newer motherboards all draw from a normal drive power cable for their additional power source (rather than the square power cable that some power supplies don't have on them). They also nicely stopped putting etchings near where you attach the CPU cooler so you don't have to worry so much if you slip while putting it on.

[Rauglothgor]

I've since found that my motherboard is a p4b266-lm, which is an Asus board. I've also found - rather unfortunately - that the -lm designates it as an OEM board(more specifically a Sony Vaio OEM board). This means, of course, that I can't get things like BIOS updates from Asus and have to instead get them through Sony. To make things worse, the last BIOS update for my particular motherboard was in 2001.

[padishar]

I have the Asus P4C800-E,and can defenitly say thatAsus makes great motherboards. Many times they are the top performers.

[Gwindor]

What is important is what the mainboards provide as far as features, the cost between the two for those features.. and also what you are looking for in a system. For me, an AMD Athlon 64bit processor is nice, but it was not everything.. the number of ram slots.. support of DDR400 ram up to 2gigs, SATA and SATA raid.. Gigabit lan, and AGP8x were all factors in my decision with going with the new board.

Hope that helps some.

-Menkure

Another to add to Menkure's list of considerations would be PCI Express on that motherboard too. With a PCI express Vid card you will notice wonders in video performance. I would say DDR2 supported MB as well with 4gigs of RAM capability.

[Tigris]

Have an ASUS motherboard, and I get something where the terrain and character vanish completely, but I can still move around.[^o)] But a relog usually fixes it.

Specs:
AMD Athlon 3000+ (32 bit) running ~2.2Ghz
1 GB DDR400 RAM
60 GB Seagate Barracuda ATA
NVidia 6800 8x Video on a BFG card

[Imayo]

Another to add to Menkure's list of considerations would be PCI Express on that motherboard too. With a PCI express Vid card you will notice wonders in video performance. I would say DDR2 supported MB as well with 4gigs of RAM capability.

I am also looking to build a new gaming system. Would you recommend going with a AGP 8X/AGPPro motherboard or a PCI Express motherboard?

[Gwindor]

Yea, i would wait unless you are in a hurry to get a system built. The NForce 4 Ultra board is due to be release in November sometime(we'll see if that actually happens)with 3 or 4 PCI express slots; the 16x video card slot and the rest are 1x slots. Not sure on the intel boards.

[Sunuke]

If you want reliability then i would go for ASUS if you wanna overclock go for ABIT if you're using a pentium CPU and for MSI if you use AMD

all my self build systems have ASUS main boards with NVIDIA chipsets and AMD CPU's and for memory i always use Corsair as they make extremly reliable memory with a life time warrenty.

Had a problem once and a Corsair technician talked me thru the problem and my system has run stable since