Athlon, So what Mobo do I need?

Depends.

Do you want DDR or SDR?

If you want SDR, how much do you want to overclock?

SDR, I'd go with the MSI K7T-Pro2. It's incredibly stable, and pretty overclockable.
If you're a big overclocker, then buy the asus. I forget which one. It's not quite as solid ad the MSI, but it has more overclocking features.

DDR, get the Asus A7V.

DDR is actually only slightly more these days...we're talking a $10-15 difference.

But with SDR, get the MSI.

The asus you want is the A7V133.

I was wrong. The DDR one is the Asus A7A266

the Abit KT7A is the best current mobo for OCing - its the most stable for overclocking athlon CPUs and is fairly and cheap (less than the asus and better performers) . if you have a bit more money to burn the overclockers dream is the I-Will K266-R - if you couple this with a 1 Ghz Athlon AXIA chip (and a heavy heatsink and fan) it will hit 1.6 Ghz

also check out - http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?threadid=3387 if you need convincing about benchmarks

your pc100 memory will work with that board but it will not perform as good as if you got some pc133

I have the Abit KT7A-RAID. It works great!

oh - btw its well known that the VIA chipset on the mobo may have conflicts with the SBLive card - http://boards.gamers.com/messages/message_view-topic.asp?name=VIAHardware&id=zzcws although the problem seems faily erratic there are plenty of people who arent having any probs at all , anyway - read the link and see for yourself

Either get the abit kt7 or the asus a7v. You can't go wrong either way. They are both great for overclocking, and are very stable high performers.

If you like raid support go with the abit.

Originally posted by Fomhoire
I have the Abit KT7A-RAID. It works great!

Click to expand...

kewel ! me too ! /me jumps up and down with Fom

May I ask, what exactly is RAID? I've heard of it, and was wondering what advantage it gives.

raid basically gives better support if you want 2 hard drives ... its worth the extra £15 or so just in case you may want super fast dual hard drive support in the future

RAID - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.

It's basically multiple hard drives running as ONE drive. There's different configurations. Sometimes you simply mirror the drives so that one drive is an exact copy of the other and if the first one crashes your data is saved on the other. This is more for large business use. For home use Raid-0 is more common which IIRC is striping. This basically splits all data between the two drives. I.e if you have a 5mb file it will put 2.5 mb on one drive and the other 2.5 mb on the second drive. This way when you access that file it accesses it in parallel and you essentially double the transfer rate. It's a pretty cool setup. It's just now getting more popular in home use but has been used in big business and government/millitary for some time.

As far as mobos go the Abit KT7 can Over clock better than the Asus A7V. The A7V has some kind of limiter on it and you can only go so high. However that's higher than most people go. The only reason I know this is that my friend has recently water cooled his 1Ghz T-Bird and A7V to 1.337 Ghz. He thinks he can get it higher than that since it's only running at 29C at that speed. However the board won't allow it. He just ordered and recieved a KT7-Raid mobo like mine so that he can do just that. I'll let you know how high he gets it up to. So far it's pretty impressive tho. About a 30% increase?

You're right about cooling and power. Ram isn't as big of a deal tho. But MAKE SURE if you get an AMD you at least goto AMD's web site and get an AMD approved power supply. My dad recently built the same system I have and was using some generic PS and the system wouldn't even post properly. Switched it out with my power supply and everything worked just fine.

Personally for the price right now AMD is definetly the way to go.