Hi everybody.

I'm about to buy me a new mobo and it stands between these two:

Asus P4C800-E Deluxe

This board seems to have good performance and being stable. It seems to work good with most of the different memories out there and overall get good score in hardware reviws.

and

Aopen AX4SPE Max II

This board usually get good scores for it's quality components, performance and being stable.

The performance gap between these two boards seems very small and from what i can tell it is the PAT on the Asus board that would be the biggest difference. I'm leaning a bit towards the Aopen board but want to check for user opinions first. So people is there any problems related to any of these two boards, any advantage/disadvantage with any of them? If i have understand things correctly the Asus board can't be undervolted but the Aopen board can or am i wrong?

The rest of the setup will be:

P4 2,8Ghz FSB800 (Northwood)
Twinmos 2x256 3200 (Gonna get me 2 more of these later on)
Antec SLK3700BQE
Zalman CNPS7000-Alcu
ATI Radeon 9200 (Pretty slow but fanless and will be changed later on to a faster fanless card)
Samsung SP0802N 80GB (Will also be changed to a Samsung SATA disk later on)

Please comment on the hole system if somebody have a better idea..The system will be used for surfing, gaming playing music etc..I was also thinking of start by using the org fan that comes with the case and listen to it first and change it later on if it is to loud, secondly install a front fan if i have to. What would u people recommend control the fan speed via BIOS or buy a ZM-MFC1?

Thanks in advance

go with the asus. Alienware uses it, gets the best reviews, need to say more?

Asus will not undervolt, the AOpen will. I don't have any experience with AOpen, but have lots with the Asus board and they are very, very good boards. If you ever think you'll want to play around with undervolting, go with the AOpen, if not go with the Asus.

The rest of your hardware looks fine, although it's easier to run 2 x 512MB of memory as opposed to 4 x 256MB so you may want to save up your scheckles and start off with 2 x 512MB.

Hi.

Thx for answering..I will go with the Asus board and when i looked at the pricing for 2x512 RAM it was actually cheaper then going with 4x256 so i going to wait until i have the money and go with 2x512 instead..

By the way anybody know of any problem with Twinmos memory? It looks like the brand Mushkin is popular in these forums?

just another Asus vote, all of their s478 boards seem to look, feel and work almost the same (in a good way), no quirky crap. i wouldn't bother with 256mb dimms though, as was already mentioned... just no reason to.

I had only a single experience with the Twinmos memory and stayed away from them ever since. I had bought 2x512 PC3200 and that memory was never able to run at the specified speed. The maximum it would do is about 360 instead of 400. Any higher, and the errors came up in Memtest. You may want to consider a more reliable brand. I bought Crucial and Corsair since, both worked fine.

How about Kingston value RAM line? Are they any good?

I've been lookin at the Crusial Ballistix since they seems to be a popular brand..I was thinking of going with 2x512 but couldn't find any dual kits..Is it safe to buy 2 singel modules and run them in dual mode or is there a high risk for incompability? Haven't had so much experince with these types of memories and operating modes..

Sorry if this subject doesn't fit the topic..

Any of the "value" lines of memory from Kingston, Mushkin or Corsair will work great. Crucial's basic DDR memory is also very good stuff. All of those companies have excellent customer service/RMA policies and will be easy to deal with if the need should ever arise.

If you think you might ever end up overclocking your RAM at some point, you'd be better off starting with some of the more expensive "Premium" lines of RAM from the above companies.

Actually, I do not know how any of those "dual kits" or "extreme performance" memory sets work. I never had any. I only used the "value selection" memory sticks and they work perfectly in my dual channel boards. I do not see any point in buying anything more expensive.

Here's a vote for the AOpen: I have used several AOpen P4 boards and can vouch for their general stability & nice feature sets. The Vcore / FSB adjusments in the AOpen boards is tops, and their hardware-based SilentBIOS fan control system is wonderful. For the PC silencer, I don't think there's a better choice. Do not underestimate the value of Vcore reduction -- if you can get more than -0.1V, the effect is often dramatic and can mean the difference between pretty quiet and a bit hot and virtually silent and still cool.

I agree on the RAM and would add Samsung to Ralf's list.

Do you already have the HD? If not, buy an 0812C - that 8mb buffer helps.

[quote="HammerSandwich"] Do you already have the HD? If not, buy an 0812C - that 8mb buffer helps.[/quote]

Yes, it currently sits in my system and is pretty new and i'm a bit short on money for now but i will add a few more disks later on, SATA 8MB cache..

I think i will go with the value line of Kingston since i can order it from the same place that i will order the rest of the system.

BW, i've always been a Intel kind of guy but read the article here on SPCR Athlon 64 for quiet power by Brian n Mike and started thinking..If you people were to buy a new system today would u go with the system i suggested above or base it on the AMD Athlon 64?

I would.

I got a 2.8 P4C a short while ago and sort of regret the decision.

Also, the Athlon 64's prices have been going down recently so they are a pretty good buy these day.

I took a look at some prices...You can get an Athlon 64 CPU that is 200 MHz faster (well, based on AMD's numbering) than a P4C, and for $20 less.

Well, I'm pretty much an Intel guy too, but I'd suggest that you go with the A64 unless you have a real compelling reason to go with Intel. P4 NW's OK but A64 is faster, cooler and cheaper.

Did a quick search and found a lot of interesting reading about A64..Seems to have a nice performance vs cooling..Gonna spend some time doing some reding up on the AMD mobos and so forth..

Anybody have some good pointers to a good mobo in the pricerange and with similair features as the Asus P4800C-E Deluxe mobo but for A64?

BW, thx for all the help people...

The following board seems to be quite nice, MSI K8N Neo Platinum, a test can be found here:

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=2036&p=1

Asus seem to be making not much mobo's for AMD64 (yet?), alot of shops seem to only stock the ASUS K8V Deluxe, test:

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTM2

I don't have any experience with either of them. Just reading up on winteltech because i'm looking to buy a machine The MSI board seems to be a favorite of some sites their 'Buy Guide':

http://arstechnica.com/guide/system/hotrod.html
http://www.anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.aspx?i=2122&p=2
http://www.tweakers.net/reviews/506/4 (dutch)

Hope this helps.

<edit>
Also see this thread:

http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=14901
</edit>

Hi everybody.

After doing som reading up on A64 socket 754 i have come up with this new system and would be glad for any type of comments or other recommendation.

Antec SLK3700BQE
Athlon 3000+
1024 MB Kingstone value ram (I'm not gonna overclock)
CNPS7000A/B-Alcu with Arctic Silver 5
NEC ND-3500A DVD-burner

These components will be carried over from my current system, lack of money, and replaced later on.

ATI Radeon 9200 (Pretty slow but fanless and will be changed later on to a faster fanless card)
Samsung SP0802N 80GB (Will also be changed to a Samsung SATA disk later on)

The questions i have about this setup is as follows:

1) I saw that Zalman had released a B version of there CNPS7000 and that the difference btw them were lower weight and a fiberglass plate with the new B version. The easiest thing for me would be to go with the A version since i can order it from the same place as the rest of the components but are there any reason i should get the B version, i'm thinking of the "new" backplate since the weight shouldn't be a problem since the Alcu version still fall inside the specs for the proc mounting system for the A version.

2) I have been looking at MSI K8N Neo Platinum mobo a bit but in some forums there where reports of some kind of trouble with them, didn't say what. The Asus board have been gettin good reviews and i haven't seen any reports of it causing trouble. Anybody have any realworld experience with these two mobos? As i can understand there are little if any performance difference.

3) Anybody knows if there is any DVD-burner with DL that is designed for quiet operation and prefferably with SATA or any DVD-burner with DL and SATA?

4) Maybe a little of topic but, anybody who knows where i can buy Panaflos here i Sweden to a resonably price all i can find are those with coloured LED's and stuff on them?

That's all for now.

Thx in advance

I've been idly pondering the same MSI mb vs the Asus K8N-E Deluxe as well, seen quite a few people having problems with both. As far as I can tell both are pretty good, humans like to complain a lot, and BIOS updates have fixed some/most of the minor problems.

Some A64 boards (presumably not entirely the motherboard's fault, but) seem to be pretty picky about the RAM they'll play nice with, there's a thread for the MSI K8N mbs at http://forum.msi.com.tw/board.php?boardid=28. Not sure about the Asus one.

I saw that i have forgotten to list the name of the ASUS mobo i was considering Sry i was tired when o wrote the post.

Anyway the boards i am looking at are MSI K8N Neo Platinum and Asus K8N-E Deluxe..

Straker, those problems with memory could those be solved by BIOS updates in the future or are they physical limitations in the components?

If You end up buying the MSI K8N Neo, order the CNPS7000 without the "A". It'll fit straight onto the stock backplate.

BTW, I'm running 2x512Mb Kingston Value RAM. They work OK, but I had to set the Command Rate to 2T in BIOS.

Cheers,

Jan

My guess would be they probably can't be fixed, I'd imagine part of the problem is the A64 memory controller itself. Read some of the threads at the forum I posted... it's a headache after a while, I'd just go with the first or second niceish-looking RAM that more than a couple people have claimed to use successfully. The really annoying thing is that it's not just entire brands or low-end RAM that don't work, seems to also depend on things like the manufacturer of the actual memory chips.
Failing that, buy from somewhere with good customer service, RAM is fairly cheap to ship back and forth anyways.

Geil is supposed to be the best budget:performance atm in the uk at least. Corsair valueram is supposed to be quite good.

Personally i like abit boards, the nf7 has convinced me. Excellent voltage control and clocking ranges.