Best £~250 motherboard Processor combo?

Paladin

Any advice? Overclockers are an option, but I dont really know which chips are best at what. Basically its the gaming end Id be interested in. Forget about graphics card for the moment.

satchmo

Do you mean AMD vs Intel? Not much of a choice as far as I'm concerned. I have a Abit KT7-RAID/AMD Tbird 850 overclocked to 1Ghz from OcUK, and it's sweet. That bundle is £266.77 Sterling (without p&p), the cheapest bundle they offer. I wouldn't think you'd get comparable performance from an Intel chip at that price. If you do get it though you might want to look into replacing the FOP32 heatsink, it makes an awful racket.

Spoonman

Anyone selling a FOP32? Jazz?

[This message has been edited by Spoonman (edited 03-03-2001).]

satchmo

I suppose I might when I get aroung to getting a Coolermaster (hopefully sometime next week), but I wouldn't recommend it - as I said it's quite noisy. And the one I have is a little knackered, one of the corners got broken in transit from OcUK although it still works fine (~44°C average).

Is there some reason you don't want a new one? They're quite cheap.

Quorthon

Jazz

Considering his budget the Tbird bundle will end up working out at around Iep£350 after p&p & conversion.

A little closer to the mark is the

Abit KT7A-RAID/AMD Duron 800 Guaranteed to 1GHz+/ThermoEngine V60-4210 - Bundle for £229

Which will end up as £300 Irish. I know a few people who have this and the performance is very close to the Tbird in most real world situations. Also the Thermoengine is supposed to be quieter (or so Ive heard) than the Fop 32-1.


Q

Spoonman

Ah right yeah, 45C hmm sounds like theres something wrong there, I already have a coolermaster but the fop32 is suppost to be much better according to toms:

http://www4.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q4/001211/cpu_cooler-01.html

I get about 45C as it is with my coolermaster (DP5-5G11) which looks similar to the picture of the 6H51 listed on toms.

[This message has been edited by Spoonman (edited 03-03-2001).]

ZStation

Asus CUBX and a P3-750E.

Cheap and cheerful, and quite a bit more stable than a AMD/VIA combo.

---

ZStation
www.lanwarz.net - Belfast's premier LANParty.
Celeron600@927, Asus V7700-64Mb, SBLive!, 512Mb PC133, Atlas10kII - making one hell of a CS box.

_CreeD_

Oh dear....I sense a return of the misniformed VIA/AMD instability issue....

My last 2 CPU/s, and 3 MBDs have been AMD/VIA. And I've found all of them to be more stable than any Intel platform I've had over the years.

Stephen

My last setup was Intel/VIA ... it was an enormous pain in the a$$.

Gerry

I think its more down to peoples own experiences, creed. Maybe your last few amd/via systems were more stable than the intel ones, but many people would see it another way. They *usually* aren't making it up. VIA's motherboard chipsets still arent up to scratch, I'll stick with my 2 year old bx, thanks.

THE SPERMINATOR

Well ive got the 1gig AMD overclocked to 1.2 and a k7 raid board and tis rock stead never had any probs with via yet touch wood hehehe.
and money wise intel are wayyyyyy out there.


Stone

satchmo

I guess Quorthon's right, a Thunderbird is out of your price range. That Duron bundle sounds pretty good though.

As for stability, the only problem I've ever had with my KT7-RAID was when I had the CPU voltage set too low. I increased it to 1.85v, and it's been running smoothly ever since.

Paladin

Ya the duron package looks nice. Ta lads.

Mills

I got the Thunderbird 850/Abit mobo/FOP-32 combo recently, I've had quite a bit of trouble with it tbh, it locks up all over the place, every few hours the mouse stops moving and she's gone, it's starting to get on my nerves now

satchmo

That's pretty much exactly the problem I was having. Are you overclocking it? What CPU voltage is it set at? What temperature does it run at? Is there any particular time it locks up (eg playing a 3D game)?

Gerry

As long as your temps are ok mills, its bios settings that are your problem. Set it to "optimized defaults", try messing with the cpu drive strength, try enabling memory hole. Basically if you mess around with it enough, it will work.

Mills

I've messed with prettymuch every BIOS setting, I change a new one every time it locks up, think I may have solved the problem though, touch wood, since I changed Voltages and some other stuff last night it hasnt crashed once, was left on all night too........ I'm hoping it's fixed.

Vincent

Up to what speed is the processor the limiting factor with a geforce ultra?, just wondering cos i'm probably gonna buy a geforce2 pro in a few months when the price comes right down, then overclock it to the speed of the ultra. Geforce3 is ridiously priced so i'll be staying clear of that.

Gerry

It depends on the game and the resolution, you can max out an ultra, even on a p500, if you turn the detail up full in quake3. I play quake3 at 1024 * 768, with a fair amount of detail off, and my 1 gig p3 is the limiting factor. This is with a geforce2 gts.

WhiteWashMan

and i bet htose extra 23mhz will make your system run so mch faster.
why does everyone overclocl?
its not like quake will run any faster?

still, i suppose youre going to say 'because i can'

logic1

Well 23Mhz isn't much of a difference and I probably wouldn't bother to clock if that's all I was getting but the difference between running an 800Mhz cpu and clocking it to 1000Mhz is quite substantial I think you'll agree. And that will make quake/Cs/UT whatever run alot faster. In fact the only bottleneck at that stage would be your RAM/Graphics card.
As shown on an article on Hardocp the limiting factor on a 750Mhz system with a geforce2 Ultra was the processor whereas when it was clocked to 1000Mhz the limiting factor became the Geforce2 Ultra card itself.
System running on 256megs of Ram of course.

.logic.

Gerry

23mhz isnt really worth it wwman, but 400mhz is a fair oul boost.