Upgrade

Permabanned
Joined
16 Jan 2006
Posts
58
Looking to upgrade to a 939 Socket AMD Motherboard in a month or 2.

This is going to be my first build so looking for one that is going to be easy
enough to install.

Not going to be overclocking anything ATM.


Choices so far -

1.Asus a8n sli (Read a few reports of the cooling fans failing are the cool pipes a better option ?)
2.Abit An8 SLI Fatality sli
3.DFI LAN sli-D (Thinking this could be to tricky for my 1st build)

Any views on these boards or any other recomendations would be very
helpful.


PS - I know Asrock do a board that has both PCIe and AGP slots but are
there any others ?


Cheers
 
Associate
Joined
9 Jan 2006
Posts
1,375
I am using the Asus A8n SLI premium. It was my second choice originally to the DFI, but I bought my ram already (Corsair) and found out that it's not the most reliable thing on those DFI boards. So i semi-reluctantly went the the Asus over the Abit Fatality and........I could not be more pleased. It's stable as rock, my RAID 5 array went up without a problem, everything fit including the rather larger Zalman 9500 and the pipe cooling means that my overall noice level is pretty quiet. The only down side to it is that the vcore max is 1.55v. Now i can still get my opty 144 up to 2.7 stabley (well it's at 2.7 now and been prime stable for 2 hours) and I am only using 1.5125 volts at the moment; so that hasn't bothered me in the slightest. The ram volts tops out at 3v too, so you won't be frying any BH5 on there, but that's still plenty to do everything you need unless you are really hardcore.

So that's a thumbs up from personal experiance for the Asus, but an admission that i probably would have gone for the DFI had I not gone for the ram that i did.
 
Soldato
Joined
11 Sep 2003
Posts
14,716
Location
London
man_from_uncle said:
I am using the Asus A8n SLI premium. It was my second choice originally to the DFI
Hi,

Same for me, got the A8N-SLI Premium yesterday, most expensive motherboard I ever bought. Its quality so far, so many accessories included as well :)

Its the best laid out mobo I have seen so far and the passive cooling seems to work very well.

I haven't installed WindowsXP yet, just doing some basic memtest stuff.

The DFI board seems to be the No.1 choice for people trying to squeeze every last drop out of there system, but from having a quick peek in the ASUS bios there is plenty of overclocking goodness there.

In the ASUS manual (page 106) it lists maximum vCore as 1.65v?
 
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