Motherboard upgrade opportunity

Cams · Post by **Cams** » Wed Jul 12, 2006 1:23 pm

It's pretty certain that my Asus A8V Deluxe has a faulty RAM slot. My preferred vendor has once again offered fantastic service and will ship me a new motherboard as a warranteed replacement before I have to send the faulty one back to them. They have also agreed to offer credit to go towards an upgrade instead of a straight replacement, and it seems a good opportunity.

So, given that I'm on a socket 939 platform, what would be a good board to upgrade to from what Kustom PCs has in stock?

Choices seem presently to be between:

[*] Asus A8N SLI-Premium
[*] Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe

They could, however, get in pretty much any ASUS board. I realise that I would have to upgrade my video card to a PCIe card, to which end, would this one suffice for my non-gaming needs:

[*] AOpen GeForce 6600 PCI-E

Or are there others that would be a better choice?

Motherboard wise, I do a fair bit of video editing but no gaming. I do like to overclock up to 240MHz although my RAM should be capable of 250MHz (DDR500) so it would be nice to have that option, as well as having the undervolting options that are so important for us SPCR afficionados. I do also use Gigabit LAN.

Or would the more plain-jane Asus A8R-MVP Crossfire be more than adequate for my needs?

I have done some research, but between our 3-week old baby, trying to fix a hosed partition table and recover data on my main system and all the usual eat/work/sleep stuff, my research time just ain't what it once was. So any advice would be most gratefully received!

Cheers
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Spod · Post by **Spod** » Wed Jul 12, 2006 10:31 pm

The A8R-MVP Crossfire has the benefit of High Definition audio, though it's based on the older Xpress 200 chipset. There's a review at Anandtech. They liked it. It'll go down to 0.8V. The A8N-SLI Premium is based on the popular nForce 4 chipset, and will run a lot cooler than the A8N32-SLI Deluxe. But I think in your case, the ATI board is your best choice.

The GeForce 6600 is a lower mid-range to upper budget card from the previous generation. It's still faster than the 7300 GT AFAIK, and should be good for reasonably recent games at low resolutions and settings. And it'll run cool, no question of that. If you were planning to play games, the 7600GT would offer two or three times the performance, but you'd want to shop around for a passively cooled version. I think the 6600 should be fine for you.

Cams · Post by **Cams** » Thu Jul 13, 2006 12:42 am

Thanks for the reply spod. If the A8N-SLI Premium runs cooler than the A8N32-SLI Deluxe, what makes you suggest that the Premium is a better choice for me? And cooler in what sense?

Audio isn't really an issue since I use a Terratec 2496 soundcard as part of my recording gear and I feed a digital signal into and out of the soundcard into a ADDA converter with monitors hooked up to it.

I'll check out the Anandtech review - thanks for the link.

Cheers
Cams

jaganath · Post by **jaganath** » Thu Jul 13, 2006 2:28 am

If the A8N-SLI Premium runs cooler than the A8N32-SLI Deluxe, what makes you suggest that the Premium is a better choice for me? And cooler in what sense?

Um, generally, cooler = better, from an SPCR standpoint. I'm pretty sure he means cooler as in temperature.

HammerSandwich · Post by **HammerSandwich** » Thu Jul 13, 2006 5:17 am

You should ask about Spod's mobo (and mine): the Asrock 939Dual-SATA2. It's a 939 board with both AGP and PCIe slots, so it provides a killer upgrade path.

Cams · Post by **Cams** » Thu Jul 13, 2006 11:43 am

They don't have the A8R-MVP in stock and the reviews I've read lead me to believe that it might be wise to up the ante a little and choose between the A8N SLI-Premium or the A8N32-SLI Deluxe.

As I understand it, the Deluxe has X16 for graphics or something like that, but that's not really important to me. So, asides from the graphics thing, is it still worth the extra money? Would the copper heatsinks be better for cooling? How about undervolting? Any other reason to fork out a few more readies for the A8N32-SLI Deluxe? I plan to add a Scythe Ninja but may opt out and stick with my XP-120. Would both fit on the two of these boards?

Thanks.

smilingcrow · Post by **smilingcrow** » Thu Jul 13, 2006 12:08 pm

The 6600 is overkill if you donâ€™t play games. I would suggest either a 6200TC with 128MB of actual RAM or a 7300 LE or GS. The 6200TC are very cheap but still support PureVideo and HD TV out. The 7300 cards are built with a 90nm process so should run cooler but cost more. I installed a 6200TC in my system today and so far it seems fine; I picked it up on offer from Scan computers for Â£22. Silly money for such a card.

Spod · Post by **Spod** » Sat Jul 15, 2006 1:20 am

I meant cooler as in less hot, less power consumption, less heat released into the case, resulting in lower air temperature inside the case and other components being able to run cooler with less airflow.
I've since noticed that Kustom PCs also do a micro-ATX board with integrated graphics. That's the coolest and cheapest option, and won't hobble you if you don't do any gaming.

Cams · Post by **Cams** » Sat Jul 15, 2006 5:23 am

Wow, that ATX board might just be the very thing! I never even though to look in that section at Kustom PCs.

I'm always kind of reluctant to go "low end" but I found a review which claims that the performance is as good as any nForce 4 SLI board, including A8N-SLI Premium.

One concern is that the NB heatsink would hamper an XP-120 or Scythe Ninja - anyone know about that?

I'm also wondering about how tweakable this board is in terms of pushing the HTT frequency. I will be running it with 2 x 1GB and 2 x 512MB of DDR500 RAM so I want to push it up to at least 240MHz. Would this be getting beyond the realms of what this motherboard is designed to do?

The upside would be that it wouldn't cost me anything (i.e. a straight swap for my faulty A8V Deluxe and no need for a video card) and that would leave the way open for me to switch to a Conroe-based system around the start of next year without this 'enforced' upgrade so close to the new platform.

The micro-ATX board also has a slot for PCI-e video card if I need to add one for Vista when it ships (if it ever does!).

So, it seems that there would be little to lose in going for the micro-ATX board, unless it would be an issue for my DDR500 or the large heatsink. If anyone could put my mind at rest about those two issues, I'll go right ahead and do it!

SPCR comes to the rescue once again! Thanks a million!

Cams

smilingcrow · Post by **smilingcrow** » Sat Jul 15, 2006 6:04 am

This Asus board doesnâ€™t have a great reputation, take a look at this thread for information on boards with the same chipset.

Spod · Post by **Spod** » Sun Jul 16, 2006 1:23 am

I've read through SmilingCrow's thread - it's definitely worth a look! You could get an Asrock dual AGP / PCIe like mine - it would allow you to keep using your existing card, and is available under Â£50 or so. It's not the best overclocker, though. Memory voltage is "Low" or "High" (2.5V & 2.7V, I'm told), and it has trouble running RAM at 1T command rate. See the end of the thread in my sig for my experiences.
Your other option is to try that 6150 board and see if it proves Smilingcrow (et al) wrong, or to get a board with ATI integrated graphics. Either way, it sounds like you need to consider a CPU heatsink that provides the northbridge/IGP with some airflow.

Cams · Post by **Cams** » Wed Jul 19, 2006 12:57 am

I've gone for the A8N SLI Premium with an AOpen 6600GT video card. It's on its way and I'm really looking forward to having a stable system.

Thanks again to you all for your help.

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