Price Guides April 2005: Motherboards
by Kristopher Kubicki on April 10, 2005 5:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Introduction
Welcome back to another edition of the Price Guides. For those of you who need some advice on new motherboards, we have a complete look at today’s market segment along with our recommended picks. As another reminder, the RealTime Price Guides will be leaving the beta testing phase, and moving into production real soon! Please send us your comments and suggestions on how we can improve our engine. Of course, you can always view the existing release of the engine here.We have been real busy over the last few weeks improving the engine for final deployment. Since our last motherboard update, we have added logical “NOT” searches, an improved developer RSS feed and tons of new products. Currently, our developers are working on tweaking the system to differentiate between retail and OEM products.
Over the last few weeks, we found a couple of bugs in the RSS feed, but those should all be fixed by now (apparently, RSS has strict interpretations on ampersands). For those interested, the official QuickSearch RSS feed forum thread is here.
nForce4 (AMD) motherboards are starting to show some actual maturity with decent driver and BIOS releases, and PCIe video cards are starting to really show headway against their AGP counterparts. Finally, we also have some PCIe options for Socket 754. Intel motherboards are about to undergo another revision in the next couple of weeks, and Anand had a small preview of 955X during the Dual Core Intel launch last week. Even though the 945/955 Intel northbridge revisions are just revisions on the existing 915/925 platform, the existing platform will not support dual core processors; so if dual core chips are important to you, don’t get stuck with an old motherboard.
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arfan - Monday, April 11, 2005 - link
#10 i am agree with u, i don't know why anandtech doesn't review all NF4 Ultra vs VIA K8T890. why we must wait so long ??? Please your comment anand....knitecrow - Sunday, April 10, 2005 - link
Forget VIA, I am waiting for the ATI athlon64 chipsets myself.Those should be good.
ChineseDemocracyGNR - Sunday, April 10, 2005 - link
I have a few comments... :)"The ASUS A8N-E comes with one of the better feature sets available and also throws in some very good overclocking features for modest overclockers. "
a few words later...
"The Chaintech (VNF4 Ultra) board won’t set any speed records and leaves a little bit to the imagination as far as features, but if you just need a rock solid Socket 939 board, this is the one to have."
These two boards have the exact same featureset: what the nForce4 Ultra provides and nothing more (no Firewire, extra disk controllers, extra network controllers, etc). They also share similar overclocking options.
They're very similar but were described very differently. The ASUS has a better bundle (more cables) and is $30 more expensive.
"We feel that the NVIDIA based boards are a little more stable and readily available at this point"
More readily available, yes. More stable, what?
I haven't seen any problems (and definataly no drivers/BIOS issues) on the few K8T890 available, so I don't know what makes the nForce more stable.
Perhaps AnandTech has some results from in-house reviews, but now comes my final comment...
how come there's so little coverage of AMD PCI-E boards here at AnandTech? No review of the ATI, VIA or SiS chipsets... basically no nForce4 Ultra production boards (only DFI). I have no idea what the problem is, but I have to say I'm disapointed.
One minor correction: "Abit nForce4 Ultra (939) AN8"; the AN8 is an nForce4 non-Ultra board. The only ABIT nForce4 Ultra is the Fatal1ty, so far (they may release an AN8 Ultra).
arfan - Sunday, April 10, 2005 - link
In Indonesia DFI NF4 Ultra sell $200 and DFI NF4 SLI $220 :((flatblastard - Sunday, April 10, 2005 - link
I agree #7....better to ditch AGP now, rather than put up with the hassle of instability at the end of a technology lifecycle.PrinceGaz - Sunday, April 10, 2005 - link
The problem with AGP was that it was a quck fix for a specific problem, which then had extra features bolted onto it along with doubling the speed a few times whenever it needed to be updated, making for a very picky and potentially unstable solution.Remember all those problems with crashed systems and drivers complaining of infinite-loops? If so you'll be glad AGP is on its way out and being replaced with a much better designed and future-proofed replacement.
mongoosesRawesome - Sunday, April 10, 2005 - link
What was so terrible about AGP? I've never felt there anything inherently wrong with AGP, especially seeing as video cards never even got close to using up its bandwidth.bupkus - Sunday, April 10, 2005 - link
I'm training myself to both skip the 1st post and to skip anything that begins with "In Sov....."I'm getting better at it.
I do believe it's unfortunate that these Comment posts have become so adolescent. It wastes the time of adults who have a genuine interest in the topic.
For those "first post" addicts, try doing a first post in the forums. You can always be the first poster there. Of course there you'd probably get a vacation from the forums.
AnandThenMan - Sunday, April 10, 2005 - link
In Soviet Russia, when first person post "first post" he get last request.I can't believe how far VIA has fallen out of favour. Wonder what their market share numbers are lately.
screech - Sunday, April 10, 2005 - link
@#1:First intelligent poster! (other then #2 of course)