Whats a good AMD motherboard now?

gs39t

I'm building a new PC fairly soon and i havent been following the market closely for the last year or so and kind of lost touch. The machine will primarily be used for video editing if thats important. The last machine i built was with an Asus A7V8X and i thought it kinda lacked a few features (firewire etc...)

So what brand / model is good now, and also what type of RAM would be the best for high powered applications?

TIA

BloodBath

Are you getting a 64bit or an athlon xp? I'd advise against the athlon anyway.


BloodBath

gs39t

I was planning an XP 3000+ at a minimum. Whats the problem with it? Ive had no issues with my XP 1700+ so thought id go the AMD way again.

BloodBath

As far as I know the Pentium 4's are far superior for video editing than the athlon xp's and pretty much everytrhing else. A pentium 4 3.0c or 3.2c would be a much wiser option.

You could always go the athlon 64 route either. I think the Pentium's may still be ahead of these on video editing though.

Definately not the xp though.


BloodBath

gs39t

Thanks for the advice

I guess the same question applies for the P4 - any good mobo's to look for?

BloodBath

Ya just looking at some benchmarks there again. The P4 wipes the floor with the athlon xp. Depends on your price range. The top mobo's for P4 at the moment are asus p4c800 deluxe and the Abit Ic7-max 3.

I have a P4 3.2 with an Abit Ic7-max 3 and it's very fast. Looking at benchmarks as well the Abit slightly outperforms the asus but they are both excellent.

Again you may not need the max-3. The normal Ic7 may suit your needs and is a bit cheaper. If you wanted to cut some costs you could get a 2.6 pentium and overclock it to 3.2-3.4ghz easily.

What components are you planning on putting into this pc? Hard-drives ide or sata ect?


BloodBath

gs39t

I already have 200GB of storage between 2 7200rpm drives. SATA isnt something ive looked at, im not sure if it would really be an advantage or not.

Basically a machine dedicated to recording and editing DVD quality video (i have another machine for everything else) . Big storage, big RAM and a fast (enough) processor are all i need in the machine

BloodBath

Well the Ic7-max3 has 2 ide ports but you can connect up to 4 ide drives through them and it also has 6 sata ports so if you need to up your storage in future you would have to get sata drives which is not a problem. No big improvement just saves space inside your computer really.

It also has a secure ide card so you can keep the data from one of your hard drives secure if you want to. You need a key to access the harddrive. Handy if security is an issue. I've no use for mine.

Basically you can have up to 10 hard-drives on the max-3. 4 ide and 6 sata.


BloodBath

astrofool

the a64 is much better when it comes to games, the p4 has a slight edge in video encoding. Depends what you're doing really.

Col_Loki

I would think like bloodbath said, the P4 is the way to go at the min for encoding. The AMD64 has came a long way from the XP's but still isint up the the P4 in that area. Also for overclocking the intels are great, the AMD64 looses out due to crappy motherboards (for overclocking).

With a 3ghz intel and decent Ram & Cooling........ 3.5ghz shouldnt be a problem, quite possibly more.

Just dont get an Xp3000+ & Xp3200+, waste of money - it just doesent perform.

gs39t

I had a look at some benchmarks and i can see that the P4 is at least 25% faster at such applications, so it seems to be the way to go

Thanks for the advice everyone