Benjamin J. Weiss wrote:
I've been thinking of getting an AMD Athlon 2600+ 333MHz FSB, and an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe mother board. (http://usa.asus.com/prog/spec.asp?m=A7N8X-E%20Deluxe&langs=09) I've seen some potential issues on this list about the nforce2 chipset, so I was curious about any positive or negative experiences anybody might have had with this mother board.I'm using a GigaByte GA-7N400 Pro2 mb, and it's working very well. FC1 detected everything on install. I installed the nforce2 drivers from Nvidia, but did not really need to do that. This motherboard uses a RealTek lan chip, so the nvidia lan driver is not needed. FC1 detected my soundchip as an i810_audio, which worked fine. When I installed the nvidia audio driver, XMMS works fine, but other apps (flashplayer, bzflag) sound weird like the frequency has been shifted up 2 octaves, and there is also distortion and clipping.
If somebody has another recommendation for a motherboard/cpu combo, I'd be interested in that as well. Basically, I'm trying to get a fast motherboard and CPU with about 512Meg of RAM for about $250 US. I'm only interested in good, name brand motherboards and RAM, I've had bad experiences with cheap ECS crap and don't care to repeat the experience.
ECS worked fine for me with linux.....Windows is another story....and ECS support is a royal pain.....
You will not see a speed increase by using DDR400 with a 333MHz FSB Athlon CPU. It may even be slower than DDR333 (PC2700). Using 'dual-channel' memory will definitely be faster (almost 50% faster in my case).
The A7N8X-E Deluxe looks like it can handle two DDR 400 256 for that doubled speed thing, which sounds good to me. I don't really care too much about AGP8x or anything, since it'll be a server, not a desktop game machine.
