what qualities should i look for in a motherboard?

Question

i am looking to build a nvidia 7900+ SLI computer with a socket 939 AMD processor and 2GB of ram at DDR400... what kind of qualities should i look for when purchasing my motherboard? specific brands maybe? please help me out i know VERY LITTLE of motherboards. spill out all the information u got i dont mind reading if u know wat ur talkin about! thanks.

Answer 1

chip set ,bus speed ,video is it AGP/on board?
check out http://www.maximumpc.com/
They have a good magazine too. If you don't mind reading/research a good place to start.

Answer 2

ASUS, Gigabyte and others make excellent motherboards with as many or as few features you need. Most feature SLI, Firewire, USB2, etc. You'll need a decent power supply to run SLI, I recommend nothing less than 500 watts. You'll also have to consider what kind of monitor you prefer, be it LCD or CRT, if you do a lot of gaming then you must look for a good refresh rate in a LCD monitor, Viewsonic have an excellent 2 millisecond refresh rate in their 19" monitor. Remember the better the features the more you pay. SLI motherboards are great but if you get a really good video card such as a Nvidia 7900 gts 2 cards is really overkill as the 7900 delivers over 100 frames per second in all the latest games at high resolution. You should really explore the Forums to gauge what everyone else is getting too and go with the majority. Good luck!

Answer 3

Shop tigerdirect.com and also read the reviews at cnet.com. Geeks.com also has good deals, and I think newegg.com has customer reviews.

I don't off-hand know the best brands, but I would look for something middle-of-the-road. It depends on what you want to use your computer for. Sounds like you wanna do gaming or multimedia editing. I'm not sure the quality of the mobo is an issue, but its features are.

I found a cheap mobo on ebay once for $5 and it's still running fine with a 733mhz P3 and 256RAM. It's not a powerhouse, but it has worked great for the past two years. Needless to say, it is my Linux box!

Answer 4

Other than the obvious, that is
1) it supports your CPU
2) it supports the type and amount of memory you need
3) everything else you need is on it

I would look for things like
1) heat management
is there enough space for large enough heat sink and the fan? Are heat generating parts too close to each other?
2) is the company known for making stable motherboards?
3) is the BIOS upgrade available?
4) what is the reputation of the technical support?
5) does the vendor you are buying from accept returns/exchanges?

I typically don't think much about upgradability as once I build it, I rarely upgrade anything except for more memory and larger harddisk. Often, worthwhile upgrade requires total replacement anyway. You might want to think about this also.

Answer 5

First of all, don't buy any of nVidia's 7900GT's or GTX's. At least, not yet. They're all failing, some within a few days, some within a month or two, but they're all failing. If you're set on nVidia cards, look around for some 7800GT's. They aren't quite as fast, but they're also lasting. If you aren't willing to only buy nVidia cards, you'd be MUCH better off buying one of ATI's X1900XT or XTX's. They're the fastest cards on the planet right now.

And concerning motherboards, what should you be looking for? Reliability, reliability, features, then reliability. If you decide to go with an SLI-capable board, look at these three: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813123251 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813136157 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813131517

The Epox is the best for the money, the DFI is slightly better, but MUCH more expensive, and the ASUS is decent, but not great.

Answer 6

check out newegg.com read the pro's and con's,or read what the people who have purchased the boards wrote about them,is it coming with a processor for 939 socket are very expensive can run up to thousand bucks,