Need Motherboard Recomendations

[excaliber]

Hi all. My dad is looking into getting a new system. We need a new motherboard, in the 100 USD range. We are getting:

AMD Athlon 3000 Barton core
2x 512MB PC4000 sticks of memory
1x 160Gb SATA drive

So, the board needs to support the 3000 Athlon, 1 Gb of memory (and fast, PC4000), and the SATA standard. We also need it to have legacy IDE ports for some of our older drives.

Dont care what chipset it uses. Just want a good reliable motherboard for a fairly fast system. Overclocking is not a big priority, although some BIOS OC capabilities would be nice.

 

[AWS]

The best gooing now is Epox.
Check out http://epox.com

 

[excaliber]

Im a fan of Epox. Good boards. We were also looking at the Abit NF7-S board. It seems to have what we need, and is on the cheaper end.

Also, I think we are going to drop the PC4000 memory for some lower speed mem. I was talking to some other people, and they said it would go to waste on that board (the FSB was too low, so we were not taking full advantage of the speed). They recommended 3200 or 3500, but trying to find some good low latency memory (cas2)

 

[vbFace]

If you are going SATA, maybe go with a MoBo that supports SATA RAID 0/1, for even faster HDD access. Seems like $$$ is no object in this new system

 

[excaliber]

Well, not quite!

We took a look, and it seems that the SATA drives are only about $20 dollars more than any IDE drive of equal size, so figured its a good investment. Actually, I think the NFS-7 does indeed have RAID on it.

 

[GavinO]

I have PATA RAID in one of my systems; I'm not terribly sure how its affected my performance, though. Only really noticable thing is improved video splice times in Premiere and VirtualDub. SATA might make a more noticable increase, I don't know.

 

[vbFace]

Speaking of RAID, which one of RAID-1 and RAID-0 is "data striping" and which is "data mirroring"? I may just run out and get 2 SATA drives now that Christmas is over

 

[AWS]

Raid 0 = striping = one drive goes bad all data lost.
Raid 1 = mirroring = one drive goes bad no data lost.