Choosing a new motherboard

pill

I need recommendations for a new motherboard.

I don't mind if its AMD or Intel but there are a couple of things I would like.

As I do not want to change everything at once I would like to keep my 2 IDE harddrives, 1 sata harddrive (using a pci card) and 2 IDE CD/DVD drives.

I also have 3 PCI cards currently installed that i'd like to keep and an AGP graphics card (ATI Radeon 7000).

So I would ideally want to only have to change the motherboard, cpu and ram (would probably want to install 2-3 gb ram) at this time, but with the added ability of sata II ports, e-pci video slots etc so I can upgrade to newer components at a later date.

Would appreciate any recommendation / suggestions.

Thanks.

bookduck

Keep what you have got and when the time is right make a BIG change.

By keeping legacy stuff or changing piece by piece, you are buying into obsolescence/old technology, botttlenecks and slowness.

They newer technology that is out there may not take off, or become popular, like PCIe, AGP x16 speed (how may motherboards support x16 speed?), PCI-X is ok-ish but mostly for servers. You may end up spending big £££ on something that you may never use and may never come into fruition, or might be superseded.

weegie.geek

bookduck wrote: »

Keep what you have got and when the time is right make a BIG change.

By keeping legacy stuff or changing piece by piece, you are buying into obsolescence/old technology, botttlenecks and slowness.

True.

They newer technology that is out there may not take off, or become popular, like PCIe, AGP x16 speed (how may motherboards support x16 speed?)

There's no such thing as AGP x16. It was discontinued at 8x. Any performance cards these days are PCI-E. If you meant 16x PCI-E, the answer is pretty much every decent board that's not a stepping stone board meant as a cheap path to upgrading old hardware supports 16x.

And it may not take off? You have to make an effort to get an AGP card nowadays. Finding a motherboard that will support AGP and the latest lines of processors and video cards will be quite a task too. PCI-E's already taken off, and it's taken over.

PCI-X is ok-ish but mostly for servers. You may end up spending big £££ on something that you may never use and may never come into fruition, or might be superseded.

I agree with the PCI-X thing, but you'd be hard-pushed to find a consumer board with PCI-X so I'm baffled as to why you brought it up. It's still very much in use in server-grade systems though.

Everything will be superseded. Eventually we'll saturate the PCI-E bus and we'll need something faster. It's the way of things. If you kept putting off upgrading because your stuff would be out of date eventually, we'd still be typing LOAD "" all day long.

@ the OP - your AGP card is a dog of a card. Is there any reason you want to keep it? Onboard video will perform better than that card, and it'll open up your options to motherboards without an AGP slot, which is more future-looking ones.

You say you don't care if it's intel or amd. I guess that means you're not only buying a new motherboard, but a new processor as well. That probably means new ram.

The problem you might find is that IDE is being phased out, and a lot of boards only have one two-channel connector onboard. Since you have 4 ide devices, you'll either have to specifically get a board with two connectors, which will cost more for legacy technology heading towards obsolecense, or you can replace your (probably quite small) IDE hard drives with SATA ones. Considering a 250GB SATA drive is a little over £20 these days, it probably wouldn't cost much to move over to SATA. Modern drives will also be quite a bit faster than your old IDE ones.

What are your PCI cards? Make sure you get a motherboard with 3+ PCI slots, assuming you need the cards, and they're not made obsolete by stuff your new board has onboard.

You could go for one of the Asrock core4dual boards, which have both PCI-E and AGP, DDR and DDR2, but the upgradeability of them is very limited. Fine if you're on a tight budget and need to upgrade right now, but you'll be shelling out for a new motherboard, and possibly CPU and ram the next time you upgrade.

If I were you I'd ditch the AGP card and the IDE drives, the old board/cpu/ram and replace the lot in one swoop. ~£200 will replace that lot.

You'll also most likely need a new power supply, btw.

bookduck

weegie.geek wrote: »

....There's no such thing as AGP x16. It was discontinued at 8x.

Sorry, my mistake

weegie.geek wrote: »

And it may not take off? You have to make an effort to get an AGP card nowadays. Finding a motherboard that will support AGP and the latest lines of processors and video cards will be quite a task too. PCI-E's already taken off, and it's taken over.

Are you sure it has taken over, granted it has a presence. I had a look a few weeks ago for bog standard PCs and they were still AGP's and not even good ones at that.

weegie.geek wrote: »

I agree with the PCI-X thing, but you'd be hard-pushed to find a consumer board with PCI-X so I'm baffled as to why you brought it up. It's still very much in use in server-grade systems though.

Majority of performance stuff has spread from server to PCs. If you want backward compatability and still want to step into the bleeding edge of technology, this I where I'd look. I personally would not buy into it, just look I'm also not after a 'future-proof' system either

weegie.geek wrote: »

Everything will be superseded. Eventually we'll saturate the PCI-E bus and we'll need something faster. It's the way of things. If you kept putting off upgrading because your stuff would be out of date eventually, we'd still be typing LOAD "" all day long.

I agree, but doing it and keeping upgrading is a money pit, and often the performance boost is not as great as starting afresh. It's not too bad if you are a business and can write it off.. I wouldn't recommend paying out a wedge of cash for a mediocre result, even if it is not my own money A bit like those folks whom were told to buy memory, and after their boxes still ran like a dog. At least LOAD never gave us the BSOD!

Good chance he'll need a new case too, especially if he board has extra ports on the back. You know at the end of the day it makes sense just to go and buy one lump of technology and feel the surge power!

weegie.geek

bookduck wrote: »

Sorry, my mistake


Are you sure it has taken over, granted it has a presence. I had a look a few weeks ago for bog standard PCs and they were still AGP's and not even good ones at that.

Not sure where you were looking, but PCI-E has all but replaced AGP. Maybe cheapo prebuilts off Ebay that are made using leftover legacy parts are AGP, but literally nothing you buy from Dell or whoever will be AGP.

Majority of performance stuff has spread from server to PCs. If you want backward compatability and still want to step into the bleeding edge of technology, this I where I'd look. I personally would not buy into it, just look I'm also not after a 'future-proof' system either

PCI-X is outdated now though. It's got a throughput of 1GB/sec, whereas PCI-E 1.1 has 250MB/sec per channel, with a maximum of 32 channels. PCI-E 2.0 doubles the throughput per channel, so you're looking at 16x the throughput of PCI-X.

Server-grade hardware isn't really about performance so much as stability, either. It's not about bleeding edge either, it's about tested and trusted hardware, and these days it's about power efficiency.

I agree, but doing it and keeping upgrading is a money pit, and often the performance boost is not as great as starting afresh. It's not too bad if you are a business and can write it off.. I wouldn't recommend paying out a wedge of cash for a mediocre result, even if it is not my own money A bit like those folks whom were told to buy memory, and after their boxes still ran like a dog. At least LOAD never gave us the BSOD!

Good chance he'll need a new case too, especially if he board has extra ports on the back. You know at the end of the day it makes sense just to go and buy one lump of technology and feel the surge power!

Can't see what use a new case would be, the current hardware the OP is running is likely to be ATX, as is the new stuff. Any extra ports will be inside the ATX faceplace area, so it'll just be a case of popping out the old faceplate and replacing with the one supplied with the motherboard.

The board might have USB headers or whatever, but those are for the convenience of putting USB sockets on the front of the case, far from a necessity, and probably not convenient enough to spend money replacing the case for.

pill

I guess you guys are right and I should ditch some of the legacy stuff I have installed and just buy a decent motherboard.

I was previously thinking of somthing like ASROCK 4CoreDual-SATA2

Now leaning towards somthing similar to the:
Gigabyte GA-X48-DS4


Just a run down on current hardware installed:
ECS K7S5A motherboard
2 x 256 mb RAM
Athlon 1800+ CPU
PCI Cards -
1 - 3 usb2 + 2 firewire card
2 - ADVANCE PCI-ST101 PCI Controller Card - 3 SATA ports + 1 IDE port
3 - 10/100 US Robotics network card

Sumvision 500 W PSU
DVD Rom Drive - old drive Matshita DVD Rom SR-8583 - 2nd ide channel master
DVD RW Drive - Plextor DVDR PX-716A - 2nd ide channel slave

Harddrives:
Quantum Fireball ST43A - 4 GB - 1st IDE Channel slave
(Mandrake 10 installed) ok so i don't use this much.
Seagate ST320423A - 20 GB 1st IDE master
(Windows XP OS installed)
Hitachi HDP725025GLA38 - 250 GB SATA drive connected to PCI card. - program files installed on this drive.

So cutting to the chase - I guess I can get away with one IDE channel and connecting the 2nd dvd drive to the PCI card. ditching the 4gb drive. The LAN pci card can also go as new motherboards seem to have it built in.

As for the AGP card if the motherboard graphic is better no point in keeping this.

So all in all a motherboard with 2 pci slots and 1 ide connector as a minimum.

Blacksheep1979

Ok you can ditch all the pci cards as any modern motherboard will have a faster network port on, should have more usb/firewire ports and headers and more likely than not more sata ports.

Those old ide drives will be dogs and extremely slow a £20-£40 sata drive partitioned as you want it will far outperform them and be easier to maintain.

Would reccomend Asus motherboards above either of the two you just mentioned - v reliable. You really have to choose a cpu though before I can reccomend a motherboard (and a price for everything too)

bookduck

Pill, what exactly are you going to do wit this pc, as if it is just for games and surfing then you might as well keep it and buy an xbox or wii or sony etc.

weegie.geek

pill wrote: »

I guess you guys are right and I should ditch some of the legacy stuff I have installed and just buy a decent motherboard.

I was previously thinking of somthing like ASROCK 4CoreDual-SATA2

I had one before and they're not bad if you're skint. Not particularly upgradeable though. I ran it for a while until the 8800GT came down to a sensible price, then replace motherboard/video card/psu all in one go.

Now leaning towards somthing similar to the:
Gigabyte GA-X48-DS4

Horrendously overpriced for what you're after. Judging by the fact that you were happy to keep your existing video card, I'm guessing you're not a gamer, so crossfire is useless to you. Unless you're planning on spending hundreds on two new video cards in the future, I'd look at getting a more budget-level board. It's the difference between spending £50 on a board and spending £100 on it.

Just a run down on current hardware installed:
ECS K7S5A motherboard
2 x 256 mb RAM
Athlon 1800+ CPU
PCI Cards -
1 - 3 usb2 + 2 firewire card
2 - ADVANCE PCI-ST101 PCI Controller Card - 3 SATA ports + 1 IDE port
3 - 10/100 US Robotics network card

As has been said, you'll get a motherboard with gigabit lan built in, and if you like, two gigabit nics.

The USB and firewire you'll get built into the board as well.

The drive controller card might be useful if you decide to keep your current drives, but I'd be tempted to ditch it and the smaller drives you have and replace them with sata ones.

Sumvision 500 W PSU
DVD Rom Drive - old drive Matshita DVD Rom SR-8583 - 2nd ide channel master
DVD RW Drive - Plextor DVDR PX-716A - 2nd ide channel slave

Beware that the PSU you've got might not handle the upgrade. It's more or less as cheap a PSU as it's possible to buy, and since a dodgy PSU can kill everything connected to it, I'd consider buying a decent PSU. As a bonus, the new one will be more efficient as well.

At a tenner or so for a DVD-RW these days, you could replace both those drives with SATA ones for less than £25. At a minimum I'd replace the reader for a SATA one. Bear in mind the smaller cables for better airflow.

Harddrives:
Quantum Fireball ST43A - 4 GB - 1st IDE Channel slave
(Mandrake 10 installed) ok so i don't use this much.
Seagate ST320423A - 20 GB 1st IDE master
(Windows XP OS installed)
Hitachi HDP725025GLA38 - 250 GB SATA drive connected to PCI card. - program files installed on this drive.

You've done well keeping an old fireball for this long. Same with the seagate. I'd replace these with another 250GB SATA drive, it'll cost you £23 or so, and it'll outperform both those drives put together. Partition it for windows and linux.

So cutting to the chase - I guess I can get away with one IDE channel and connecting the 2nd dvd drive to the PCI card. ditching the 4gb drive. The LAN pci card can also go as new motherboards seem to have it built in.

If you're thinking of ditching the 4GB drive then I'd definitely replace the 20GB with a SATA drive. Maybe pick up an IDE>USB caddy for ~£6 and use the 20GB drive for backups?

weegie.geek

Spamming much, akhanna? Adding nonsense posts like that with your link in your sig?

The crap on your site's yank-centric anyway, and this is a UK site, so your site's not much use to us.

pill

Pill, what exactly are you going to do wit this pc, as if it is just for games and surfing then you might as well keep it and buy an xbox or wii or sony etc.

I am not an avid game player - although I will play them occasionally. The most strenuous applications I will be running include: Nebula DigiTV application, Solidworks 3d CAD modelling, Rhino3d CAD and MS Access. Other then that its the usual stuff...

Would recommend Asus motherboards above either of the two you just mentioned - v reliable. You really have to choose a cpu though before I can recommend a motherboard (and a price for everything too)

CPU options - include
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ 3.0GHz Socket AM2 2000MHz
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0GHz Socket 775 1333MHz bus

Either would out perform what I have at the moment and hopefully stand the machine in good stead for at least the next 5 or so years.

I've looked at some Asus motherboards now and these 2 look ok.

Intel Motherboard: ASUS P5Q PRO S775 P45 ATX GLN+1394+SATA2R FB1600 DDR2 IN

AMD Motherboard: ASUS M2N-E SLI

Your views on these boards/cpu - or suggestions for a better one for my requirements.

Thanks for all the comments already made.