Asus A7V8X-X or A7N8X

[Jumper]

Will appreciate some help from the experts in this forum. I don't know much, really very little. I decided I needed a newer computer, my old one of many years is a Celeron 400Mhz. After visiting a few stores that will build a custon system for you I settled in the one that was most friendly towards me. Bought a custom system which after bringing it home had many problems. After carting the box back and forth to the store for repairs various times I finally got fed up and ended up returning it for my money back. The list of what went wrong is too long for this post. So back to the rest of the stores again, only to get more double talk and one contradicting the other. So I decided to build my own system so then I only have myself to blame if something is not right.

Been reading and gathering information on different components, but I am uncertain as to what is the difference between the mb Asus A7V8X-X and the A7N8X. Can some of you tell me?

The rest of what I have in mind is:
AMD Athlon Barton XP2500 or 2700
RAM PC2700 512K, what brand?
Lite-On CDRW
Maxtor Ultra 80gb, 8mb buffer, 7200rpm, ATA133
Audigy 2 Platinum
ATI a.i.w. Radion 9000 Pro 64mb
Windows Home XP
Antec Truepower 380 W.

Kind thanks for any replies.

[coldfusion22]

The main difference between the A7N8X and the A7V8X is that the A7V8X-X is a VIA chipet based board and it does not offer dual memory support. The A7N8X and A7N8X deluxe offer dual memory mode. Such as 2x 256MB chips dual mode utilizing 256MB for dual mode.

I build a A7N8X for my dad and it's very fast. And it's performance on many sites is better than that of the A7V8X board. I've used Kingstons 512MB PC2700 ValueRam becuase my dad isn't an overclocker and it works fine.

Go to Corsair.com crucial.com or kingston.com and check their site for the board your getting to see what memory works for it. I think most like Crucial the best.

[coldfusion22]

you should also check out asus.com and compare the boards. I'm sure there will be others opinions as well.

[peterwilkes]

I have an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe Mobo and it's fantastic. Its very fast and stable but you MUST use the correct ram.

The motherboard is very picky on the manufacturer of the RAM especially if you want to run the stuff at the full speed (which you will want to do) Supported ram is on the ASUS info page for the A7N8X Deluxe.

Another thing... The RAM must be DDR333 / PC2700 type to get the maximum performance out of it but you can go for DDR 400 / PC3200 RAm which will boot the performance a little.

THe A7N8X - Deluxe is also a good overclocking board and supports the SATA HDD's and has good quality built in audio.

Highly recomended. Just ask if you need any help with setting this up and it can be a little tricky.

[ale_x13]

i think the difference is one supports the nvidia nforce2 (a7n8x) and the other has a via chipset (a7v8x)

im not sure of the difference between the two, but the a7v600 is also a via based board (with the 600 chipset)

there is a link here:

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/...-axp3200+.html

that compares an athlon 3200+ xp running both a7n8x and a7v600 boards, with a p4 3.2ghz running two different motherboards also.

anyway, the test (although i believe the a7v8x is faster than the a7v600) clearly shows that the nvidia based board (a7n8x) is considerably quicker than the via based board.

hope that helps

alex

[ale_x13]

here we go, found a better one

http://www.legionhardware.com/html/doc.php?id=220&p=0

the differences in performance, features etc between the two boards are virtually non-existent looking at this review

imo the a7n8x is the better of the two, but thats all it really comes down to, opinion

[Telexen]

Opinion? The opinion that a lot of people are tired of VIA's poor chipsets and are glad there's another chipset manufacturer in the market for AMD systems is shared by MANY

[Jumper]

Wow! thank you guys for the replies and opinions. I spent hours reading up the links about mem brands and mb tests. Although I understood only about 20% of it, maybe even less, I have concluded that either the N or V mb perform basically the same, so I decided to go with the V. Since the system I returned was using the double channel thingy and had problems, although it used the a Gigabyte board GA7N400L. Maybe it was a Ram problem, God knows! It is just too fresh in my mind to go that double channel route again. Regarding the mem brand it seems that Crucial is more convincing. Hope I can get it here in Canada. Wish me luck. Thanks again. You guys are great.