I agree with nerdonsite2, the Epox has a big fan crowd as well as the Asus A7N8X. If you're wanting a good all-around board with great o/c'ing abilities as well, go with the Epox. If you're wanting more features, such as Dual NICs, and other Asus only features, then you can spend a little more and get the Asus.
Either way you go, be sure to get two sticks of 256MB DDR RAM, that way you can take advantage of the DualDDR feature of the nForce2 chipset. It effectively doubles the bandwidth between the CPU, Northbridge and the System Memory.
Really, you'd just have to look at features needed vs. price to make your decision.
All my Athlons run very quiet. Even quieter than my 1.8 P4!
And temps are about the same. The thing that you must remember is that although AMD CPUs tend to run a little hotter, it's the heatsink that makes all the difference. I'm running a 1.4 T-Bird(the hottest proc IMO that AMD made) @ 1.8Ghz, and it's idleing at 38c with full load at 42c. Not too bad!
The best IMO heatsink fan combo for the AMD Athlon would be the Vantec AeroFlow. It combines an improved version if the cooling design of the Dr. Thermal Extreme(argued to be THE best HSF), with a TMD(Tip Magnetic Drive) fan (reviews can be found at
http://www.vantec.com and click on the bottom picture of the Vantec AeroFlow).
It is pretty quiet and ranks as one of the best coolers. Another viable option is the Zalman. Very good quality, and with that one, you could even build a virtually silent PC.
Quote:
David, you forgot 1 thing.
Intels are currently running on a 533mhz fontside bus, while AMD is still stuck at 333mhz (I can't remember that number).
This is the only real limitation to AMDs sucess, other than the delayed release of AMDs new chip. |
Actually, if using DDR to benchmark, AMD will outperform Intel any day of the week, because, as benchmarks have proven, having the RAM speed in sync(the same) with the CPU FSB will give the best performance. So, Intel, while they theoretically have a higher FSB, will perform sub-par with the AMD. Now, with RAMBUS memory, you wil get better performance with the Intel, but still, the fastest AMD against the fastest Intel is still pretty close, and finding RAMBUS is getting pretty hard(and expensive) as well as Intel is continually trying to get away from it and work on the DDR more.
And, AMD will be moving to a 400FSB with the next barton, so we'll be able to run the RAM at 400FSB and get quite a performance boost. And the best thing is that the nForce2 boards support it right now. (the most you would need is a BIOS flash)
Any more questions, just let us know...
And if you're wondering why I'm so Pro-AMD, it's not because I'm biased or partial, it's because I'm honest and say what the benchmarks say!
David
EDIT:
Oh, one more thing... The DDR FSB of the Athlon is normally a pretty close comparison of how well it will perform. But, Intel uses something called 'Quad-Pumping' which is different than Athlon's 'Dual Data Rate'. When you quad-pump the FSB on the Intel, it's still running at only 133 True FSB, but with the Athlon, it's running at 166 True FSB(soon to be 200). So, while the 533Mhz FSB and 333FSB are
theoretical maximums of bandwidth, I can safely say that only on rare occasions do you actually use that maximum for sustained periods of time. But, since the Athlon's FSB is higher before the DDR or QP, then it will have a better performance per clock cycle on average than the Intel.
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