Could someone suggest a good duron mobo?

you can't go wrong really with anything from asus or abit. my abit KT7E is superb. alledgedly doesn't support 266fsb... but it secretly does. and... IT'S BLUE! very similar to the LOOOOVELY KT7A, but erm.. cheaper... and BLUE! get it.

and if you're only running a lower spec system, i'ev had a few FIC AE31's in the past, and they're very very good for the money. buil;t in grpahics and sound for just £58. $80?? works fine on the linux installs i've put on it.

ASUS and ABIT as above are great boards! Gigabyte makes a fine board also. If you want an inexpensive yet tried and true board, go with something to the effect of the ASUS A7V. You can find it for less than 80$ US these days. But really, any of these three manufacturers make good boards, so it's really price range and upgradability.

first box i built myself had Gigabyte GA-7ZM in it... crashed all the time. nasty buggers i reckon. had to patch the bios just to get mp3's to play

I have the ABIT KT7A-RAID...Nothing but problems.

I dont know why but I CANNOT install ANY operating system when my CPU is running at its full speed (1ghz). It works fine at 750 (what the motherboard thinks it should be). After the OS is intalled, i can then set it back to 1ghz.

I have only heard good things about ASUS from everyone i've talked to. A friend of mine has a new asus and loves it. I suggest going with them.


......and if anyone has any suggestions for my little problem please let me know...

Hi

Funnily enough, I have a similar ABIT KT7a Raid problem. 1G athlon 266 but only runs at 200. Wondered if it was the 1G of memory, tried swaps etc, no help. Tried upgrade PSU, no help. Mine won't even boot properly at 133 fsb. Have given up for a while as I have a work project to do, but next step is to manually assign IRQ's/.

Check out ...

http://www.viahardware.com/faq/kt7/kt7faq.htm

For Pauls unofficial FAQ and some excellent links.

JIm

I have ABIT KT7-RAID without A, the processor is ATHLON 850 MHz socket A, and this combo runs very well with my RH7.2, windows though freezes still after 2 mins if I am not running any graphics intensive apps (like games).

If you want the best performance, then definatly go for the EPoX 8KHA+ KT266A. Pick up a cheap duron 850 and o/c it to 1000mhz and your set!

If you want the features get the Abit raid board.

the new iwill xp333-r is a very good board. im very happy with it so far =)

Puterfreak
I just fixed mine, as always, after weeks of banging my head on the wall, it took 2 seconds (sort of).
1 If you've got an agp card, your average 300w psu can't cope, so I got a 340watt enermax. It still didn't work so I gave up.

2 Just read a mail thread found via google, said ABIT advised them to put their two dimms in slots 1 and 3.

3 Also crucial support had mailed me and said that manually setting cpu parameters in softmenu seemed to work, so I went into soft menu, set up manually, with exact same numbers as cpu auto defaults, booted and its running!

Detects cpu correctly, all seems to work as it should. Have set it crunching a seti block as a workout.

Jim

I've just built my first machine ever about 2 weeks ago. I did a lot of research on basic compatability issues with hardware and read some reviews at tomshardware.com and others......... I went with the soyo dragon with raid control mobo. I don't have any hands on experience with any other boards, but I'm very particular (anal) and I haven't had any problems with this board ever (yet). I run amdxp1900 and 512mbddr....seems to run smooth with both win98 and linux........of course linux runs better....... I have invoked the blue screen 'o death a few times in windows already.

how fast are u completing one blcok from seti??

The machine did 18% of a block in about 90 mins. Sadly, I started using it for other stuff, and got loads of segfaults and hangs I think X/gnome may be implicated, as the colours on screen keep changing, and logins fail. Things have disappeared eg samba apache and most of the services I had running before. I think I need to reinstall. I guess the install will be the real test of the machines stability.
Jim

OK so it still didn't work. There are lots of options, like elsa graphics card (nvidia chip), and the hpt bios/controller driver. I was going to update to xfree4.1.0, but first I looked at pauls kt7a faq, saw that there were new highpoint drivers out, called v1.3, apparently works with RH7.1 and 7.2. Sadly I damaged my 7.2 install CD, so I'm having to download ISO 1 again.
Jim