need hardware advice....

I need some advice regarding pc upgrades. I'm pretty much upgrading everything except the cd/dvd/zip and floopy drives and want some advice about 2 mobos.

This one is the more expensive one with a faster bus speed and AGP 4X.

This one has more memory slots, AGP 8x but has a much slower bus speed. Also has lots of other features like the hardware monitoring which seems kinda gimicky.


The second one comes with a AMD Athlon XP2400+ and the first with a Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz Boxed PC533.

So which one is best and which should I buy?

damn... that's a tough choice. First off, they're both MSI, and honestly, MSI isn't exactly the best manufacturer in the world. But, given that, let's compare.

Intel board = ATA/100 (-), ATX, USB2.0, LAN (+), Sound, 533 MHz bus (+)

AMD board = ATA133 (+), ATX, USB2.0, AGP8X (+), Sound, 333 MHz bus (up to, -)




Well, I can't directly put the +'s and -'s into the two but I can at least put them in some places. I like the faster FSB and onboard LAN of the intel board, but the AMD board has more of a future, even if it's current isn't so great.

Unlikely you'll use the 8X AGP anytime soon, you probably won't use the onboard sound either (at least I wouldn't), and the 333 MHz bus is really only for the 2600+ and above. You can run your memory async at the full 333 MHz, but generally with AMD async is actually slightly slower performance, so that bus is really 266 MHz in the most logical situations.

Another thing to look at is the AMD board can hold up to 3 GB of RAM while the Intel can only hold 2 GB. Not as though it matters, but's it's cool anyway.



So, I guess it comes largely to your own personal preferance. While I like AMD better myself, I can't deny that the Intel seems to have the upper hand on this deal. This is kinda a "bells and whistles" type thing because honestly you won't really see much of a performance difference between the two.


And if I seem like I'm babling, I probably am. I really need to go to bed...

well I'l probably be using the onboard sound, unless someone tells me how $$$$ it is (cos I've heard that onboard sound is relatively good these days:))

And I'll be getting and AGP 8X geforce 4 to go with it so it might be useful to get a mobo that can handle it.

thx for the quick reply travisS

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onboard sound is relatively good these days

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Sure, it's not bad as it was once, now C-media onboard sound-cards are nice option. Of course is nothing close to a SoundBlaster Audigy or a live 5.1 but sure are good options.

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And I'll be getting and AGP 8X geforce 4

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Think twice, Radeon 9700PRO (or 9900) takes G4 in benchmarks.

There aren't any single disk drives around that are fast enough to make the difference between ATA100 and ATA133 significant, (unless you are using two or more in a RAID 0 of course). With a few serial ATA drive around now, and some, (albeit buggy), mb's I suspect that state of affairs will not change, ignore the ATA speed. What will make a bigger difference is rotation speed and the cache size on the disk, choose a 7200 rpm drive with as big a cache as you can find, 8MB would be good.

>>Think twice, Radeon 9700PRO (or 9900) takes G4 in benchmarks.

And actual performance, if i cant have 3dfx i want ATI : )