Price Guides, February 2005: Motherboards
by Kristopher Kubicki on February 12, 2005 3:00 PM EST- Posted in
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Athlon XP motherboards are still in vogue these days, although it's getting harder and harder to justify why. With VIA left as the only active participant in the Socket 462 market, your options these days are very limited.
There is still a ton of inventory on the nForce2 end of things – particularly for the single channel motherboards. However, prices have gone up every model and the nForce2 IGP is getting a little long in the teeth. IGP doesn't make a whole lot of sense right now, considering the dirt cheap prices on NVIDIA TurboCache cards, but we will leave that analysis to next week's GPU guide. Again, the reasons for sticking with Socket 462 are fading fast.
KT880 is clearly the most mature solution on the Socket 462 market, but motherboard vendors are somewhat sporadic. Overclocking Athlon XP mobility chips on some of the Tier 2 motherboards probably won't yield expected results, but the Tier 1 components are selling at nearly the same price of the Athlon 64 components. Take our advice – stick with Athlon 64. If anything, the announcements of Windows x64 RC2 and Intel's unilateral support for 64-bit should be enough to sway nay sayers into the 64-bit camp.
ASUS (again) pretty much dominates the Athlon XP camp with the A7V880 [RTPE: A7V880]. The KT880 stands as the most mature and one of the cheapest Athlon XP motherboards available.
Given that there will be no more revisions from anyone on Socket 462 core logic, it's pretty safe to say that you definitely want to buy a motherboard that has some longevity in it if you don't want to get stuck "eBay'ing" your Athlon XP in a few months. One trick that we like to do is frequently check the number of "refurbished" items at resellers. If you see several refurbished motherboards for a particular SKU, people are obviously returning the motherboards for one reason or another.
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ChineseDemocracyGNR - Sunday, February 13, 2005 - link
#9,no he's not kidding. There are several reports of dead boards, or boards that killed PSU's, memory modules and processors.
Both moderators of dfi-street had their boards die on them.
And not just related to this, but if you really want to know the truth you can't settle for AnandTech's review of any product.
bersl2 - Sunday, February 13, 2005 - link
On Thursday night, the MSI nForce4 Ultra board hit $145 + $5 shipping on NewEgg. It's out of stock right now, though.overclockingoodness - Sunday, February 13, 2005 - link
#8: You are kidding, right? The latest DFI motherboards are the best of the best. Check out the latest AnandTech review if you want to know the truth.arswihart - Sunday, February 13, 2005 - link
no one know what the DFI's performance is yet, so I don't know what you're talking about. And looking at various hardware forums on the net, there seem to be more problems with DFI than with Epoxoverclockingoodness - Saturday, February 12, 2005 - link
Yep, I agree with you justly. Just because SiS chipsets are not for extreme users doesn't mean they are not a worthy contender. As you already know, enthusiasts make minority of the PC buying population. Only if you guys reviewed SiS based motherboards, value users may want to look into them. NVIDA, VIA and Intel aren't everything.justly - Saturday, February 12, 2005 - link
I don't understand why Anandtech seems to have such a hard time recognizing SiS as a chipset option.Why is SiS listed at the end of the last page under "other deals" and not under "Athlon 64 AGP", the SiS 755FX is a "Athlon 64 AGP" chipset is it not?
When doing a search for SiS chipsets why "only" search for the 755FX chipset?
Maybe you could explain how "SIS clearly lost the "oomph" they once had", as far as I can recall every Anandtech review of (or comparison to) a SiS based motherboard (since the days of the 735 chipset) has shown SiS as a good if not a excellent chipset for all but the most extreme of enthusiasts/overclockers.
I just can't fathom why SiS (and ULi/ALi) seem to be looked at by the Anandtech staff as if they are lepers and can't be associated with the likes of nVidia and VIA when they often perform as good as if not better than equaly priced (or even more expensive) boards using these other chipsets.
PrinceGaz - Saturday, February 12, 2005 - link
I'm sure it'll be included in an upcoming nForce4 roundup. Epox's mobo will have to be something special to outperform DFI's though.arswihart - Saturday, February 12, 2005 - link
specifically, forgot to mention, they left out the 9npa (nf4), and did not mention 9npa-sli which will be released shortly. Also, did not mention the 9nda3+ that they reviewed. Thats not very respectful to Epoxarswihart - Saturday, February 12, 2005 - link
amazing, they totally ignored Epox, the best motherboard maker out thereand they have yet to issue an update to there negative review of the 9nda3+, to my knowledge, this is the most trouble-free 939 motherboard out there today. They have new BIOS code that fixes the early memory limitation Anandtech flamed about. Basically, now that I own a 9NDA3+, I can't really take Anandtech's reviews for a grain of salt.
Manzelle - Saturday, February 12, 2005 - link
Graph states 2001 as the year...