On Sat, 29 Jan 2000, you wrote:
> I know this is severely OT but I would appreciate feedback from the readers
> of this list. My boss's boss has given me yet another batch of motherboards
> unreliable by design (last time, AstroMicro; this time, ProComp) and I would
> appreciate recommendations of good motherboards, especially anecdotal
> evidence of quality.
>
> I've heard good things about:-
> - Gigabyte
> - Tyan
> - ABit
Good boards, but they'd come after Asus, Aopen, and Soyo.
BX before VIA, and nothing i8<whatever> should even be
considered. As far as P3's go, any 100mhz fsb cpu, Katmai
or Coppermine, is preferable to any 133mhz fsb cpu. This
is for ram, and agp considerations on a BX motherboard.
eg, you can run a 133mhz cpu on a BX board, and your pci
bus is in spec at 33.3mhz, but the agp bus is 89mhz, and
all but unusable. Quality ram will run at 100mhz at cas2
timings, much harder and more expensive to find cas2 pc133.
I'd suggest the Soyo 6ba+III $90 (or 6ba+IV if you believe
there's anything to be gained with ata/66). Before I'd read
anything on ZDnet, I'd check reviews at Tom's, Anand's, Ars
Technica, BXboards, and most oc'ing pages, etc.
>
> (The PCs run Pentium III CPUs up to 550MHz and are Linux/Windows98
> dual-boot. I figure, if it'll run Linux, it'll run Windows, but not the
> other way around.)
>
I run a p3-450 at 608mhz, pc100 at 135mhz cas2 on a Soyo
6ba+III. It runs W98 or Mdk6.0 equally well. It'll run
prime95, either Winblows or Linux version, self test looped,
with -0- errors for as long as you want.
> I'm looking on ZDNet for reviews but I trust the Cooker people more than
> ZDNet. I'm not asking anyone to do my research for me. You folks are yet one
> more information resource for me to exploit- umm, I mean, utilize. :)
>
> TIA,
>
> HugoRabson
--
.. Tom Brinkman [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
