Good gaming mobo

[defiled]

its my first time building a computer and i was wondering if ne of u have any tips for a good gaming motherboard P4 if possible. I play diablo, counterstrike and i want something that has crisp and fresh graphics for Unreal tournament 2004. ne tips will help a lot thx.

[John Prophet]

Welcome to the forum!

There are like 9 million great P4 boards out there.

You mentioned graphics....you arent looking for onboard graphics are you? Surely you want a seperate video card if you are into games.

I think if you stick with about any 800fsb board from Asus or Abit or Gigabyte or maybe MSI..I dont think you could go wrong.

Have you got a certain budget in mind?

You can go here and compare some boards and prices

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...tby=14&order=1

and here for abit boards http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...tby=14&order=1

Just get one with 800fsb for the cpu and 400 for the ddr and youll be straight.

Also you can check the reviews and when you see one you are interested in...put the name of the baord into google and find a review or two from an overlocking or hardware website....that will tell you how well it really performs...and they always have gaming benchmarks etc.

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A lot of these nice P4 boards also have all the extra features....I see that most of them have 6 channel sound, sata/raid etc etc. So that is another thing to choose by..what extras you want...for instance firewire or gigabit ethernet etc.

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I see that some of them in that first link..the asus boards, have "Intel extreme graphics" onboard and some have "radeon 9200" graphics onboard. I have no clue how good those graphics are..but in any case, onboard graphics steal cpu cycles and generally kill you in benchmarks....so for real gaming Id definitely go with a seperate vid card.




This board looks reasonable for a low budget basic board http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...=BROWSE&depa=0

and maybe this one for the fancier features http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...=BROWSE&depa=0

If you look up some reviews you can find benchmarks and find which is better, the SIS chipsets or the Intel chipsets etc.

JP

[defiled]

Thanks for your tips and yes i plan on gettin a seperate video card for my motherboard an ATI i believe and also ive seen a lot of different boards even one of the ones that you posted in your message and i always seem to find a couple of reviews saying that that mobo is a piece or came dead or one of the chips are loose and i just wanna make sure that my investment isnt a waste.

Once again thx!

[defiled]

ooo and i also want to ask is gettin a heatsink for your ram worth getting or should i not even bother with that?

[Optimus Prime]

Don't bother, all it does is make them look cool, not be cool .

[d1sc g0lf3r]

I would recommend either Asus or Abit MoBo's. They both make quality boards. Like John Prophet recommended I would go to www.newegg.com and check out the specs on each board and see what features they offer that you might be looking for, ie. Firewire, Onboard LAN, Serial ATA...Plus there are reviews of the products from people who have bought them as well. If you plan to buy the parts online that is one of the best sites to buy from IMO.

[John Prophet]

probably the best thing to do is try to find a "roundup"..which is where they review and compare several boards together...showing benchmarks and strengths and weaknesses etc.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/motherb...215/index.html

http://www6.tomshardware.com/motherb...825/index.html

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1930

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1975

here is a long list of roundups... http://www.jathardware.com/links/2000/19.html obviously you have to look at the dates cuz these things get outdated quickly.


and after you read thru the reviews you might start to think more in terms of "chipset" and less in terms of motherboard....because usually one particular chipset is identified as best. (the chipset is just the main chips that make up a motherboard...usually there are 2 of them called the northbridge and southbridge..but sometimes there is only one main chip). For instance the Kt266a was best in its day...and the NForce2 was etc etc. So once you find the best chipset you can then start to narrow it down to finding a good board based on that chipset.

JP

[defiled]

thx guys... again

and one more question- what is serial ata raid or sata i dont understand i understand justabout everything else but for sum odd reason i just cant seem to understand what raid or sata or whatever is and what it does

[HeadBand]

sata is a new interface for harddrives...right now its not much better than ide but i think over the next few months it will become more prevelant

raid has many different type the most commen being 0 and 1

raid 0 is where it sees two physical drives as 1 logical drive and reads/writes to each simoultaneously,therfore, increasing the speed

Raid 1 is ususally used on servers where data is very important...it writes the same to two drives so if 1 fails the other still holds the data...I would not recomend a raid 1 in a home pc...just back up your data to a cd or manually copy it to another harddrive

raid 1 is wh

[defiled]

alright thx i understand a bit better i think....