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Geek Culture / Buying a motherboard with ~ £60, any suggestions?

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eat much pie
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Posted: 1st Sep 2004 19:23 Edited at: 1st Sep 2004 20:48
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Some of you may remember my previous thread on which graphics card to get, well this is kinda like that (by the way, I got the GeForce 6800 from Dabs).

I have a bout £60 burning a hole in my pocket, so I was wondering if any of you have any ideas as to which motherboard I should buy. My specs:

Intel Celeron 2.4 Gh
512mb DDR RAM (the PC2100 type)
GeForce 6800 (ie. need an 8x AGP slot)
CD Re/Writer
Floppy drive


And also, if the inbuilt sound card has 5.1 surround sound capabilities, then all the better!

Cheers!

NB.
What are the parts of a motherboard that vary over the price range, ie. for a graphics card, these would be the memory clock frequency and the core clock frequency and the inbuilt RAM, etc...


edit:
I've used 3D mark 3 with my 6800, and I got a score of 7228. Is that good?


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Sam Wright
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Van B
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Posted: 1st Sep 2004 22:36
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The thing with motherboards, is that the manufacturer means a great deal - cheap motherboards will drag your spec down to it's own level. I can't remember the make of motherboard, but my brother was mangling on about a cheap but well built motherboard in the same price range - I'll question him tonight and see if I can post a link, he tends to know his stuff when it comes to hardware.

Your 3D Mark score is pretty good, a lot of people say that <10000 is low spec, well I score <1500, so I should'nt really be able to play Doom3 or BFVietnam, but I can (my PC is about half the published specs, most notably I only have 256mb memory - yet I can play it at 20-60fps). You should be able to play any game at good resolution and detail, just not stupidly high detail if you know what I mean.


Van-B


Muhahahahaha.
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eat much pie
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Posted: 1st Sep 2004 23:12 Edited at: 1st Sep 2004 23:14
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interesting...

At the moment, I'm using an AGP 4x port to connect my 6800 to. Would it make much difference to gameplay if I got a motherboard with AGP 8x?

Cheers!

NB. My current motherboard is the M266A from ASRock


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Sam Wright
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ionstream
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Posted: 2nd Sep 2004 08:06
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The Biostar M7NCD is a cheap and nice motherboard, 5xPCI, AGP (8x), 400mhz side bus, Socket A ( Amd Duron, Athlon XP). It's nice and stable.

"Trying is the first step towards failure." - Homer Simpson
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eat much pie
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Posted: 3rd Sep 2004 03:18
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Cool, but I don't think that AMD motherboards work with celeron.

Intel motherboards work with the celeron. Are they good?

Cheers!


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Sam Wright
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the_winch
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Posted: 3rd Sep 2004 05:07
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I would save the money. Buying a new motherboard just for 8 x agp isn't really getting you anything for your money. It proberly won't make any noticable difference while playing games.
Set it to agp 2x and run the benchmarks and see what difference it makes.

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geecee3
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Posted: 3rd Sep 2004 05:10 Edited at: 3rd Sep 2004 05:13
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get another 60 quid and buy an NFORCE2 based motherboard and an AthlonXP2600 - you will then have a fairly groovy games machine that will play nice and smooth at a decent detail level. you'll also find that you can be more creative with the amount of stuff you have flying around the screen when playing with DBPRO. or you could spend the 60 notes on beer and phonesex. the choice i leave up to you.

regards, geecee3.

ps. FFS, chuck out your floppy drive. it's only 2004. (they were introduced by SONY in 1980, it's ok, really, you can let go!!!!!)

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Turoid
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Posted: 3rd Sep 2004 05:14 Edited at: 3rd Sep 2004 05:14
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[EDIT]
oops sorry ..

syntax error??? it isn't an error, it is a feature

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eat much pie
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Posted: 3rd Sep 2004 05:56
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Although, my celeron processor supports multithreading, and my current motherboard does not. Would that make much of a difference?

Cheers!


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Sam Wright
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GothOtaku
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Posted: 3rd Sep 2004 07:49
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Be careful and make sure that it supports your CPU, the Celeron isn't supported by all manufacturers. And if I remember correctly I don't think that motherboards effect multi-threading on the chip itself but could possibly effect input and output.
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