Im gonna be building a new pc soon. what motherboard would anyone recommend for an AMD Athlon? I've had a couple of friends that have had problems with athlons, but they insist that it is just the motherboard not the cpu.
Any suggestions??

i got a tyan.. never go wrong with tyan.. no problems ever.

yeah... ive been looking at tyan and asus. the amd page has a lot of Mboards that they recomend, i just want to make sure i dont have problems with it and Linux.

I run both an ASUS with an Athlon T-Bird 1.1Ghz and I have not had issues with it. I also have an Abit board with an XP 1.4Ghz, and it is doing good so far.

I have heard Gigabyte makes a good board as well.

Check Toms Hardware guide (run a search on yahoo). It gives good comparisons and benchmarks.

Also http://www.motherboards.com has boards you can buy, with many of them having reviews written by real people.

Hope this helps.
-Steph

no problems here with my abit. you might want to check amd.com, they list suggested mobo's for each type/speed processor.

And while on this thread, I have a problem. My box hangs after a while, it may be 5 minutes or 24 hours, it just hangs still. It happened a half year ago when I used windows with linux, windows hung where linux run beautifully. Now I got rid of windows, and linux freaks out will it be redhat or mandy (dual boot), so I am puzzeled, I have ABIT KT7-RAID mobo with 850MHz Athlon, 512 MB RAM (SDRAM), the hang thing occurred even with different configurations ( on old mobo,don't remember manufacturer, with K6 too, that was the main reason I upgrade to ABIT and Athlon), I suspect it is IDE controller went bogus. Has anyone experienced the same or similar problems?

yeah thanks for the motherboard page, its really cool

I've got the exact same board, 5 OSs have all run on it fine. drjimstuckinwin (yeah, the regular here), also has that exact same board and had one problem with it, but he tracked it down to RAID (he was actually using it, but it took a BIOS update to keep it stable). The only time my machine acted goofy was remedied with the mem=nopentium option in LILO. I had finally gotten all the DRI and AGP goop to behanve properly and fell prey to the athlon+AGP bug. If that isn't it, I'd be safe in recomending from experience that its not the mobo.

Also, figadiablo, for what its worth if you're looking in the low end of SocketA XP boards, I've recently put together 3 machines off of the current Epox board that are all solid, and the hex code numerics for diagnosing BIOS codes is a bloody great idea so debugging is a breeze.

Cheers,

Finegan

You gotta be kidding me. We all know Tyan is well known for making good SMP motherboard buts single processor motherboards...well all they can hold is their stability but as far as features and stuff go, they can go down the drain.

Asus is not bad, but their new Athlon motherboard with the KT266A chipset are definatly not up-to-par with the Epox 8KHA+ or Soyo Dragon Plus.

If you want a guaranteed trouble-free install go with the Abit KR-7A if you have the money, otherwise settle for a Epox 8KHA+. Asus A7V-266-E is also a sturdy peformer clock-for-clock, but its overclocking is substancial.

hope this helped clarify some rather misleading points made in this thread. I apologize i didn't make it any sooner than i did.

Good budget motherboards are ones based on the SiS 735 chipset. Like the ECS K7S5A, they support all athlons up to the mp/xp and have onboard sound, and video.

The high end OEM solution would be ones with the nForce chipset. They have 5.1 onboard sound and a slimmed down version of a Geforce2 onboard with AGP 8X interface (no its not faster than a Gf2 MX in AGP form but its still good).

and uhhh, you should get a quality power supply from sparkle or similier if you can afford. A good power supply will last you many computer upgrades for many years to come. And trust me, i've learnt this da hard way ...

Therion12 wrote:
Ahem, what exactly did you clarify? The Tyan board opinion? Let ME clarify something. Your little remark is not nice or appreciated.

Tricky simply mentioned that HE has had no problems with a Tyan board. He said nothing about it being a great board in general, nor did he even sound like he was trying to.

You need to really watch how you say things. I see your posts frequently, and many times you write something that can easily rub the wrong way. Use smilies if you are making some kind a joke, otherwise dont make these kinds of remarks. It offends people by making them feel as though the opinion they contributed is not worth anything, and that is not right... especially for a Linux community.

I'll like to thank everybody, tyan followers and abit followers for all the help, everybody has been a lot of help today. Please make love not war. We are all linux lovers, and we should love our linux brothers. like I said EVERYBODY has been great.

Amen. I didn't want to put ne 1 down.

My 2 cents about AMD motherboards. Keep in mind that I haven't used one yet, this is only stuff I've heard/learned!

I'm into digital audio... making music with my computer. Audio and video apps can be extremely taxing on a computer, much more than everyday business apps. PCI and memory speed is critical. As well, since most people use higher end audio cards (not supported by Linux ), compatibility and stability are also crucial. Anyways, one of the apps I use a lot is Logic Audio. Many people are reporting wicked results with AMD XPs and the MSI nForce motherboard. Stable and fast. If you go with the nForce, make sure that you put equal amounts of ram in memory slots 1 and 3 (ie use 2 256 sticks, not 1 512). Top pick if you need a fast stable motherboard and a video card. It's kind of expensive if you don't need the video.

that's all I can say. Oh, I built a system for a friend with the ECS K7S5A, and it was fine (and cheap).

sluggo

Yeah thats a nice motherboard, not the fastest in the world but gets the job done. The nForce are good for people who want build in stuff but the KT266A beats the nForce in nearly all games, and applications and is cheaper too (becuase it doesnt have onboard video)