These are for AMD chips...

Gigabyte GA-7VRXP or SY-KT333 DRAGON Ultra Platinum edition or the newest EPoX board... I'm tryin to get an upgrade on my computer, but cant seem to decide on what board to get! These are just 3 of the boards im lookin @ right now, but i am open to any suggestions...

plz give me reason for pickin a certain board and the pros/cons. reason that i am hesitant on gettin the Gigabyte is because it got mixed reviews. Praise from tomshardware.com but got bad reviews from others. the reason i am hesitant on gettin the Soyo board is that it is a bit slower in performance than some of the other boards baesd ont he benchmarks on the sites i read. The EPoX board is really nice, but it doesnt have all the features of the Soyo board and Gigabyte board.

I am lookin for a board w/ RAID, preferably USB 2.0, at least 5 PCI slots, 1 AGP slot, and just watever. So please recommend me a good board, or tell me which of these boards you think woudl be best for me. This computer will be used for all different things including, but not limited to, gaming.

thx

I have built machines with both Gig and Epox with the 266A chipset. Not much difference that I can tell. Both are rock solid and stable. Those benchmark scores do not really reflect actual use, as most people cannot tell the differnece between a few points here or there. The video card is the key if you are a gamer.... I prefer the Epox because I like their digital LED instead of the audible post. Both are good choices...remember, they are all made in Taiwan! LOL

I agree with cb, he sounds like he knows his stuff

If your lookingh for features i would get a ASUS A7V333 RAID it even talks to you if there is a boot up problem instead of using beeps or LED's.

Yes, the ASUS A7V333 RAID is an excellent mobo...probably the BEST. But its a gonna COST ya!!!!!!!!!!

I think the gigabyte board is excellant and cheaper than the ASUS too. Check out tomshardware.com for loads of motherboad (and other pc kit) reviews.

I've got the Gigabyte one, and it's got RAID onboard (RAID0 and RAID1) and an onboard Soundcard (which I have disabled) and NIC (which I am using). It has got USB2 (though these aren't the ones built in to the main connector block, they are broken out on to a seperate slot thingy), and 5 PCI slots and an AGP slot. Dual BIOS is a nice idea and seems to actually work. All in all seems stable so far, would recommmend it

As a PS, I'd say don't bother with the Asus if you want the audio warnings - they are unintelligible - a mate of mine has one, and it took us about 20 attempts with the side of the case off to be able to hear what the voice was saying. But the iPanel addon is a nice idea.

Cheers,
Rolf.

It was unintelligible because he was using the internal buzzer instead of external speakers.

Rolf: I have the gigabyte board as mentioned above. You mentioned the dual bios, what exactly is the point of it? I know its there but it doesn't seem to do anything for me.

It's just in case you currupt the bios with a bad flash etc the backup bios will repair the original bios and allow you to boot your machine.

Diablo: there's nowhere to plug external speakers in to - we tried plugging them in to the built in sound card, but no dice. Perhaps it's a failure of his board.

The dual bios feature on the Gigabyte board also allows you to recover from BIOS virus attack, or even if one of your BIOSes just gives up the ghost and breaks. It keeps a copy of your old (known good) BIOS, and from the BIOS screen you can access a utility that will let you flash your primary BIOS from the code in your secondary one, if something bad's happened.

Is very cool, IMO (but then it's probably something you wouldn't appreciate until you've lost a BIOS, which has happened to me once in the past (and no, wasn't flashing it at the time - it just died - and the whole mainboard needed to be replaced - was without a PC for weeks)).

Cheers,
Rolf.

There's a jumper on the board which alow you to use the pc speaker or the on-board sound did you try moving that?

Yep, we tried it with the onboard sound card active and inactive. Like I said, might be a failure of the board. Still, would be a pain in the arse to have to do that each time you needed to know what an error was - he's got a proper sound card (SB Live) for normal day to day use.

Cheers,
Rolf.