MOBO's- Are There Any Good Ones ??

[Guest]

I have been reading some comments here in THG forums in regards to some unhappy users of Asus mobo's. I was surprised to read them. If Asus boards and the quality of their tech support is in question, what other boards would be considered top of the line? Would it be to much to expect a top of the line mobo manufacturer to also supply very good tech support and service? ......Vista

<b>"A politician should do two terms-one in office & one in jail"</b><P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by vista on 01/24/04 05:16 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Crashman]

Some problems with the latest boards are directly related to problems with the latest memory. Intel said there would be problems a long time ago, and there are. In fact, Intel had planned not to release the "800" bus until DDR2 was out, but they changed their plans due to market pressure.

You see, the design of current DDR memory does not lend itself to high clock rates nor low latencies. I read a whole technical explanation of these issues.

Companies like Crucial usually rate their memory slightly slower than it's peak, so it will work in a variety of boards. Modules other companies would rate at Cas2.5, Crucial would rate at Cas3. This is done to insure that the module works without messing with voltage and timing settings manually.

Companies like Corsair are selling overclocked memory. You often have to overvolt their PC3200LL just to make it run at SPD values, for example. You gain performance but loose the ability to just plug the parts together and use them as is.

Abit offers 4-phase CPU power, a better solution than Asus, but their IC7 series happens to be one with many reports of RAM latency issues. These can usually be addressed using ordinary tricks normally reserved for overclocking, such as raising vDIMM or loosening latency values.

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[Guest]

Crash,
Thanks for the additional information. Another stone in my path. My take on this based on what you said is that if using a dual channel 800mhz FSB it may or is a good idea to go with memory that is not to low in latency say 2.5 or 3 in order to be more stable even though it will cut down on performance some. I was wondering now if it might be agood idea to skip dual channel memory to avoid these issues. If so would you have any recommendations on the most mobo, CPU and memory I could get in this department. I have also been reading recently of unhappy users of the Abit & MSI boards. When will DDR 2 be out? The only boards that I have read about that people seem to be happy with are the Intel & Gigabyte boards. They don't seem to be having as many issues with these two boards as compared to the others? The Intel board seems to be pretty much a default use board and possibly for good reason, to keep it more stable and less tinkerable. Thanks.....Vista

<b>"A politician should do two terms-one in office & one in jail"</b><P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by vista on 01/25/04 04:54 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Crashman]

With nearly any board this would be easy if you know what you're doing. You could go with Crucial RAM (www.crucial.com), which is a bit underrated in order to assure stability. Or you could go with lower latency RAM, but might have to manually add latency in BIOS (or raise vDIMM) to make it stable.

Corsair recommends PC3500C2 for performance on these boards because it comes with slightly slower SPD values, so that's another choice still.

Intel tends to make their boards more stable by slowing down a few things, hence they loose benchmarks. I don't know about Gigabyte's 875P boards.

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[Guest]

Crash,
What boards are you referring to here?

Corsair recommends PC3500C2 for performance on these boards because it comes with slightly slower SPD values, so that's another choice still.

Are you saying that I can run PC3500C2 in either Asus, Intel, Gigabyte boards and it will be more stable and run better. Will I still have to make adjustments to any voltages any where?




<b>"A politician should do two terms-one in office & one in jail"</b>

 

[Crashman]

I'm saying that PC3500 is more likely to run stable at default settings than PC3200, at PC3200 speed.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>