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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arswihart - Friday, February 18, 2005 - link
where is evidence of a v2.2 9nda3+?arswihart - Friday, February 18, 2005 - link
nm zipzoomfly does not have them, although really newegg and mwave, who cares if not every single seller has them, they are easily purchasable and should've been included is my pointarswihart - Friday, February 18, 2005 - link
I got my 9nda3+ from Mwave, plus Zipzoomfly has them, not to mention others. What are you talking about? I take back my comments about the nf4 boards, but you really should've included the nf3 boards.sonicDivx - Wednesday, February 16, 2005 - link
umm the NForce3 (939) prices are missingLive - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
It did help :) Thanks for the swift replies Visual and Kristopher. These little nuggets of information could give extra value to the price guides if included.KristopherKubicki - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
Live: I think Visual makes the best point. Online the prices remain very close to each other, but offline the two boards have a larger disparity in price.Visual: The Neo2 Platinum (the socket 939 nforce board) went on backorder everywhere overnight. It got real pricey. the original Neo (socket 754) is still a great buy and I would c onsider it just as good as the otpion we recommended for the guide (for a 754 board).
Hope that helps,
Kristopher
lsman - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
Pretty much only newegg carry the Epox 9nda3+ or j. And Epox is yet again with newer verison. (9nda3+ up to ver. 2.2 now) Better BIOS option (but the Caps are different...)Visual - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
on their price engine, the a8n-sli vanilla is priced almost same as deluxe, so it makes sense to go with the deluxe... if the prices were such.but they aren't. i wont bother myself with checking the online shop prices, but at my local shop i got myself a vanilla asus sli for $140, while the deluxe was $40 more. in these circumstances the extra cash for the deluxe is not worth it. if you actually look around some forums you'll see a common advise is don't use the extra sata ports, and dont use the extra lan port on the deluxe, even disable them in the bios :p then why pay for them in the first place?
funny how you dont list the msi neo2 platinum nforce3 board... with it being the best nforce3 out there (at least according your reviews). has it stopped selling or what?
Live - Sunday, February 13, 2005 - link
Good guide as usual. One thing that I don’t understand is why the ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe is recommended over the vanilla ASUS A8N-SLI.The only thing you get that is deluxe is a second LAN port and extra raid options. I fail to see what you would use a extra LAN port for? I only have one internet connection and most LAN:s are set up with hubs or routers. So what is it for?
The silicon raid controller is only useful if you want to add more the 4 hard drives in your raid setup right? How many users do this? Considering the use of raid is not that common I would guess a 4+ raid setup would be a very rare find indeed. It would seem to me that the extra $ spent on the “deluxe” would be much better invested in almost any other part of your setup.
So why the deluxe?
KristopherKubicki - Sunday, February 13, 2005 - link
The reason why we didnt mention Epox products is because - you can't buy them anywhere.Kristopher