I was looking into buying a new motherboard. I have a few Questions. Is brand a huge thing in buying a mobo. I see Fry's Electronic ads and they have these Ecs boards for sale all that time. So I jsut assume they have got to be a crap brands. I currently have a computer which I bought at a store (yeah yeah, loser right?) so will I be able to put any mobo on it? And is it cheaper to buy the mobo and chip separately or together. thx in advance.
if you buy a fly by night brand you might not have support for the mobo like drivers better bios,etc.what processor do you want,that matters alot.there all different pins like 939,370,a socket,intel or amd processors.there is so much to research first.
you should pick a processor first and then build around that.i have a 3700 + san diego amd
hey by the way,i think everybody started with a store bought,even ddp[lol]
i dont know about that.i have an amd 64 3700+ san diego this processor smokes and i hear the dual cores[amd]are unbeliveable for that type of thing.things have changed,i think amd is back on top, not sure though.
The reason I asked is b/c a store I know sells alot of boards but they always have a sale on ecs. And I mean everytime I've gone there there have been sales on ecs, not just crap mobos, pretty good actually. Most of my friends have ASUS boards so how are those?
Check out newegg.com, even if you don't buy from these guys being able to read the customer's comments will help you spot a dog quickly. The ASUS boards are good high quality boards, they made their reputation overclocking the Intel lines, their AMD boards are good, but not the best overclockers. DFI boards are the leaders in AMD overclocking, but are a bit more difficult to get "right". A good "value" board that has gotten decent reviews is the ASRock mobo for $69.00, it can take either a NVIDIA or ATI graphics card and has dual SATA II.
And you really should go with AMD64 chip of some kind. AMD leads Intel in CPU technology, and that's not just me but every authoritative source you can find. Even tomshardware.com, the most pro-Intel site on the net (other than Intel.com ;) ) gives AMD its due.
I have both a P4 2000 Dell and my new rig in the signature. The AMD is a far, far faster at video than the Intel, taking only about a fourth of the time of the Intel on large episodic DVD's done with a full DVDRebuilder/CCE encode. I have the same model of burners in both rigs and no difference on burn quality per Nero.
As for the size of motherboards, there are multiple different sizes, the ATX is the "standard", but there is also Micro ATX and the new Intel BTX (not many of those at all). You can measure your motherboard and check at the dimensions of an ATX mobo on newegg and it will let you know what you have. The big problem with using your current case comes from two areas: (1) Power Supply: more powerful processors require better power supplies, so you might need to upgrade in that area; (2) Cooling: more powerful processors use more energy and generate more heat, adding a more powerful fan may work, but many of the custom cases have 2, 3, 4 or more fans. Cooling needs will depend on processor wattage use, my AMD X2 uses 89 watts, the dual core Intel Pentiums use over 220 watts (can you say easy bake oven), this is stock. If you OC it gets worse. My case has two fans blowing in and two blowing out plus the power supply fan venting, with a 20% overclock the cpu is 24 degrees C at idle and 42C under heavy load, fairly frosty.
