AMD 64-X2 socket 939 recommendations?

Looking to upgrade to an AMD 64-X2 4400 and am seeking motherboard
recommendations. It'll be a scratch build, with 2x SATA II x 250-300 GB in
a RAID 0 configuration, a Lite-On DVD/CD burner, a floppy drive (just in
case), 2 GIG of CAS 2-2-2-5 PC3200 DDR, PCI-X-16 NVidia card (not high end,
as games are not a priority) in a well-designed and well-cooled case, and
with 500W of clean quality power. Onboard GigE would be nice, but 10/100 is
all that is needed right now, as nothing I have is GigE (yet.)

If it was an Intel CPU I would look to ASUS first, but they don't seem to
do AMD as well as they do Intel. So I'm thinking MSI, DFI, GigaByte, ABit,
or DFI; and seek recommendations from people with hands-on experience with
the 939 X2's and any of those mobos.

Thank you for reading.

I'm using an MSI K8N NEO4 Platinum motherboard with an A64 X2 4800+ CPU,
and I'm very happy with it so far. I'm using a SATA-2 drive, but not
RAID (although the mobo supports it). I'm using an eVGA GeForce 6800XT,
which goes for about $60 at Newegg after the rebate. This mobo has two
onboard Gigabit ethernet adapters. It's based on the nForce4 Ultra
chipset. I'm using 4GB of OCZ Platinum series PC3200 DDR. Finally, the
price was pretty good (about $100).

Personally, I don't have much use for the plexiglas-and-lights cases, so
I'm using a Gigabyte Triton case, which comes with two 120mm case fans
and handles cooling quite well; I think it's a pretty well-designed case
that looks good too. I used an Antec Truepower II 550W power supply.

All things considered, I'm very happy with this motherboard, and,
assuming it holds up well (it's only a couple of weeks old), I wouldn't
hesitate to buy another.

Mark



Harlequin wrote:
Looking to upgrade to an AMD 64-X2 4400 and am seeking motherboard
recommendations. It'll be a scratch build, with 2x SATA II x 250-300 GB in
a RAID 0 configuration, a Lite-On DVD/CD burner, a floppy drive (just in
case), 2 GIG of CAS 2-2-2-5 PC3200 DDR, PCI-X-16 NVidia card (not high end,
as games are not a priority) in a well-designed and well-cooled case, and
with 500W of clean quality power. Onboard GigE would be nice, but 10/100 is
all that is needed right now, as nothing I have is GigE (yet.)

If it was an Intel CPU I would look to ASUS first, but they don't seem to
do AMD as well as they do Intel. So I'm thinking MSI, DFI, GigaByte, ABit,
or DFI; and seek recommendations from people with hands-on experience with
the 939 X2's and any of those mobos.

Thank you for reading.

Harlequin wrote:
Looking to upgrade to an AMD 64-X2 4400 and am seeking motherboard
recommendations. It'll be a scratch build, with 2x SATA II x 250-300 GB in
a RAID 0 configuration, a Lite-On DVD/CD burner, a floppy drive (just in
case), 2 GIG of CAS 2-2-2-5 PC3200 DDR, PCI-X-16 NVidia card (not high end,
as games are not a priority) in a well-designed and well-cooled case, and
with 500W of clean quality power. Onboard GigE would be nice, but 10/100 is
all that is needed right now, as nothing I have is GigE (yet.)

If it was an Intel CPU I would look to ASUS first, but they don't seem to
do AMD as well as they do Intel. So I'm thinking MSI, DFI, GigaByte, ABit,
or DFI; and seek recommendations from people with hands-on experience with
the 939 X2's and any of those mobos.

Thank you for reading.


I've heard good things about the nForce4 boards, and wish I wouldve
gotten one instead of the Via K8T800. My only other recommendation is
skip the 4400 X2. I run a 3800 at 2.4GHz on stock voltage...200 MHz
faster than a stock 4400 for around 35% less money. Only downside is
the 3800 has half the L2 cache of the 4400. Spend your savings on
more/better RAM.

-Dylan C

Tried Toms Hardware site?
I initially used a Neo platinum, on reccomendation, but bd was faulty,
finished up with GA-K8N Ultra 9 which works fine, allthough Nforce Active
Armor doesnt work - see Nvidea Forums for many posts re this - I do notice
that Gigabyte doesnt seem to update drivers/bios as frequently as other
manu. Whether this is because they get it right first time....?

"Harlequin" wrote in message
...
Looking to upgrade to an AMD 64-X2 4400 and am seeking motherboard
recommendations. It'll be a scratch build, with 2x SATA II x 250-300 GB
in
a RAID 0 configuration, a Lite-On DVD/CD burner, a floppy drive (just in
case), 2 GIG of CAS 2-2-2-5 PC3200 DDR, PCI-X-16 NVidia card (not high
end,
as games are not a priority) in a well-designed and well-cooled case, and
with 500W of clean quality power. Onboard GigE would be nice, but 10/100
is
all that is needed right now, as nothing I have is GigE (yet.)

If it was an Intel CPU I would look to ASUS first, but they don't seem to
do AMD as well as they do Intel. So I'm thinking MSI, DFI, GigaByte,
ABit,
or DFI; and seek recommendations from people with hands-on experience with
the 939 X2's and any of those mobos.

Thank you for reading.

In , on Wed, 31 May 2006 00:41:20
GMT: Dylan C wrote:



I've heard good things about the nForce4 boards, and wish I wouldve
gotten one instead of the Via K8T800. My only other recommendation is
skip the 4400 X2. I run a 3800 at 2.4GHz on stock voltage...200 MHz
faster than a stock 4400 for around 35% less money. Only downside is
the 3800 has half the L2 cache of the 4400. Spend your savings on
more/better RAM.

-Dylan C



Thank you Dylan,
I can get the extra ram and the 4400, which could be overclocked to
equal a 4800 if I wish, or just go like Mark did, and get the 4800 to
begin with.

Harlequin

On Mon, 05 Jun 2006 14:06:37 -0600, - HAL9000 wrote:

The next version of windows, vista, includes voice command
capabilities. I'd be willing to bet that a dual processor system (X2)
is going to handle voice much better than a single processor system.
Voice commands are "real time" and therefore need a devoted cpu for
best performance.

Following the "signature" of your voice will be very memory intensive
as well...

I had voiceworks way back when Iwas running OS/2 on an old Cyrix CPU and
6432Meg of ram. It aint nothing new. it does require a lot of cpu usage,
but nothing compared to how fast they are these days. And it's a nice toy
til you get tired of it. And then it makes mistakes just like the current
voice recognition used throughout the phone industry that keeps saying
"I;m sorry, I didn't recognize your response".:-) I'm not a fast typist,
but it was faster to type a letter or something like this than it was to
go back and fix the screwups. maybe it's gotten better by now. I haven't
tried it in years. The point being, it's hardly something new. New for MS
maybe.

--
Want the ultimate in free OTA SD/HDTV Recorder? http://mythtv.org
http://mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html Usenet alt.video.ptv.mythtv
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HD Tivo S3 compared http://wesnewell.no-ip.com/mythtivo.htm

"Mark Baker" wrote in message
news:twXeg.1226$sP1.698@fed1read07...
I'm using an MSI K8N NEO4 Platinum motherboard with an A64 X2 4800+ CPU,
and I'm very happy with it so far.

I have to agree. I just put a system together with the Neo4 and a 4400+x2. I
kove it so far. Very stable and responsive. Only 2GB of RAM, though.

I'm using a SATA-2 drive, but not RAID (although the mobo supports it).
I'm using an eVGA GeForce 6800XT, which goes for about $60 at Newegg after
the rebate. This mobo has two onboard Gigabit ethernet adapters. It's
based on the nForce4 Ultra chipset. I'm using 4GB of OCZ Platinum series
PC3200 DDR.

Is it double or single sided? Running @400 or 333mhz (my understanding is
that 4GB *will* run at 400 mhz if it's single-sided, although I haven't
tested that theory here)?


Finally, the price was pretty good (about $100)

Personally, I don't have much use for the plexiglas-and-lights cases, so
I'm using a Gigabyte Triton case, which comes with two 120mm case fans and
handles cooling quite well; I think it's a pretty well-designed case that
looks good too. I used an Antec Truepower II 550W power supply.

All things considered, I'm very happy with this motherboard, and, assuming
it holds up well (it's only a couple of weeks old), I wouldn't hesitate to
buy another.

This is my 2nd MSI here, and have had no complaints whatsoever (other than
nVidia's IDE driver issues, which were resolved once I removed them). The
only reason I upgraded was to have a board for a 3500+ I have laying around.
Shame to let that go to waste.

Alex


Mark



Harlequin wrote:
Looking to upgrade to an AMD 64-X2 4400 and am seeking motherboard
recommendations. It'll be a scratch build, with 2x SATA II x 250-300 GB
in a RAID 0 configuration, a Lite-On DVD/CD burner, a floppy drive (just
in case), 2 GIG of CAS 2-2-2-5 PC3200 DDR, PCI-X-16 NVidia card (not high
end, as games are not a priority) in a well-designed and well-cooled
case, and with 500W of clean quality power. Onboard GigE would be nice,
but 10/100 is all that is needed right now, as nothing I have is GigE
(yet.) If it was an Intel CPU I would look to ASUS first, but they don't
seem to do AMD as well as they do Intel. So I'm thinking MSI, DFI,
GigaByte, ABit, or DFI; and seek recommendations from people with
hands-on experience with the 939 X2's and any of those mobos. Thank you
for reading.

Right-e-oh Wes, it's definitely not new. A few years ago I did a
project comparing IBM's voice recognition software and Nuance (then
just called Dragon) voice recognition software. There are a couple of
aspect that are new though.

1) The voice commands are tied directly into the operating system and
not just for application X and application Y. Laborious user defined
application "scripts" usually played a role there. So, there are no
scripts to deal with for control of the operating system.

2) The recognition capabilities should be very high (lots of emphasis
on "should be", LOL). At least from a technology perspective the
capability should be much higher than most everyone is used to
experiencing. Here's why. When you (1) have a limited number of
words to select from (are valid at a time) and, (2) you train the
recognition software with your voice - recognition is extremely high.
The first item being the main contributor to high recognition.

As I recall, trained voice dictation (where you can say any word
string - very hard computationally) is about 85-95% accurate. A lot
of that has to do with how extensive of the vocabulary the voice
training is/was. But when you limit the scenario to just one word
instead of string of words, and, one particular word instead of any in
the dictionary the computation is many orders of magnitude less. I'd
guess that MS's implementation of voice recognition is 99% or higher.

I could go on, regurgitating my report, but I would probably be the
only one to read it, LOL. I haven't seen the voice recognition in
vista operate but I'm expecting it will be very worth a try.

Thanks for commenting ;-)

Forrest

Motherboard Help By HAL web site:
http://home.comcast.net/~mobo.help/


On Mon, 05 Jun 2006 22:57:29 GMT, Wes Newell
wrote:

I had voiceworks way back when Iwas running OS/2 on an old Cyrix CPU and
6432Meg of ram. It aint nothing new. it does require a lot of cpu usage,
but nothing compared to how fast they are these days. And it's a nice toy
til you get tired of it. And then it makes mistakes just like the current
voice recognition used throughout the phone industry that keeps saying
"I;m sorry, I didn't recognize your response".:-) I'm not a fast typist,
but it was faster to type a letter or something like this than it was to
go back and fix the screwups. maybe it's gotten better by now. I haven't
tried it in years. The point being, it's hardly something new. New for MS
maybe.

On 30 May 2006 04:12:46 GMT, Harlequin wrote:

Looking to upgrade to an AMD 64-X2 4400 and am seeking motherboard
recommendations. It'll be a scratch build, with 2x SATA II x 250-300 GB in
a RAID 0 configuration, a Lite-On DVD/CD burner, a floppy drive (just in
case), 2 GIG of CAS 2-2-2-5 PC3200 DDR, PCI-X-16 NVidia card (not high end,
as games are not a priority) in a well-designed and well-cooled case, and
with 500W of clean quality power. Onboard GigE would be nice, but 10/100 is
all that is needed right now, as nothing I have is GigE (yet.)

If it was an Intel CPU I would look to ASUS first, but they don't seem to
do AMD as well as they do Intel.

Really ?

FYI, I have an Asus A8N32-SLI. Overclocks a AMD X2 4400+ nicely to
2.65GHz.(YMMV of course), verified totally stable using multiple
simultaneous instances of Prime95, 100% loading both cores and all
memory (2GByte) over a 10hour period --- maximum CPU core temp 49
degrees C w/ Zalman CNPS9500 heat sink@1700RPM. Dual 250 Gbyte
SATA @3Gbits/sec in RAID0 on the nF4 controller; zero problems.
Single 7800GTX video card. System up and running since late Novemver
2005.

John Lewis

So I'm thinking MSI, DFI, GigaByte, ABit,
or DFI; and seek recommendations from people with hands-on experience with
the 939 X2's and any of those mobos.

Thank you for reading.