Price Guides October 2004: CPU and Motherboards

AMD NVIDIA Motherboards

NVIDIA has ruled the roost for AMD - based chipsets for quite some time and they don't appear to be in the mood to give that up any time soon. From the first days of the nForce2 chipset up until now, NVIDIA has pretty much been the standard if your new rig was to incorporate an AMD processor.

In the Socket A realm, the NF2 chipset continues to be the favorite among gamers and overclockers. On top of this, Abit's nForce2 NF7-S Rev. 2 remains a very popular motherboard for a good number of reasons. One of the top reasons for the board's popularity is the extensive overclocking capabilities that it possesses. Some of the best overclocking can be done with the NF7-S when paired with a Barton-based Athlon XP. Stability and support are two other reasons why we recommend this board. Abit is known among enthusiasts to be a solid name in motherboards. Dual-channel memory, SATA, and onboard LAN and audio help round the package out.

For anyone going with an Athlon 64 based on the Socket 754 design, which you might as well, since 939 tends to still be a bit pricier on the motherboard side and even more so on the CPU side, there are two boards which should fit any user's needs.

The first is the Chaintech nForce3 250 (754) VNF3-250, which sells for under $80 shipped at many online retailers. It lacks some of the bells and whistles found on higher end NF3 boards, but certainly has all of the basics including onboard LAN (of the 10/100 variety) and audio, and a working PCI and AGP lock for the overclocker in all of us. Basically, it's the best overclocking board around for that price-point and the Silver Editors Choice award that we gave it in May of this year is a direct result of that fact.

If price isn't such an issue and you are willing to pay a little more for the rest of the toys, the MSI nForce3 Pro 250 (754) K8N Neo Platinum is the board to buy. This board is fully loaded with 7.1 audio from the Realtek ALC850 7.1 audio chip, GB Ethernet, firewire, optical and coaxial digital sound output, and plenty of options for storage. The board has a standard four SATA and four PATA drive capabilities and utilizes nVidia's "Any Drive" RAID, which lets you mix and match drives for RAID arrays across the controllers.