In article <>,
says...
>
> Abit very much still worth having. A lot depends how much you want to spend
> and how far you want to overclock, but the AB9 QuadGT is arguably the best
> performing 965 based design on the planet. The IP35 Pro is better than the
> QuadGT in some ways, worse in others. On balance little to choose between
> them. The AW9D series are established and stable.
>
> The forthcoming IX38-Max and IX38-QuadGT should be killer, the same board
> but one with DDR3 and the other with DDR2 sockets.
>
Depends on what you want in features, really. I'm currently also looking at
upgrading my NF7S to some thing a little .... gruntier. It's my 3rd generation
of Abit boards. But I think I will abandon Abit this time around. I want a
board with _2_ PATA channels. Which precludes the 965 chipset and leads me to
the NVidia650i.
I also want a serial port at the back of my box, thank you very much, since I
don't want to throw away a lot of good expensive hardware; be it UPS, be it
external dialup modem for emergencies or testing ... and that shuts out Abit's
650i board. Too many things missing, never mind the performance (which is
pretty good, according to TomsHardware).
Asus sounds - um - flakey these days. Lots of people moaning and complaining
about some of their boards. That company sure seems to have its ups and downs:
they turn out a bunch of crack boards for a while, then turn out some that look
like they were build while on crack. I've had one of each in the past ;-)
So I think I'll go Gigabyte this time round. Their 650i board has everything
they could fit in, com, parallel, 2xide, best power pipes (6) in its class, all
solid caps. Sounds pretty good to me. Performance differences overall seem
minimal between brands, so I decided to go with the features I want, not to
mention that I have not seen _anyone_ moan about problems with this board
(yet). And I expect I'll stick a 6420 into it, and probably spend what I saved
there on a 8800gts 320 video card.
-P.
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