Hi guys,

to my greatest misfortune my computer's Epox mainboard said goodbye the
other day, most likely cause being the bloated and partially leaking
capacitors I discovered upon closer inspection.

Now I need to get my PC up & running again asap, and was wondering what
new mainboard I should get. I can't afford a more comprehensive upgrade
right now, so it will have to be a board which supports my Athlon XP
"2000+" (the salesperson said it was a T-Bred B, but I think it's rather
an "A" because despite sufficient cooling it runs rather hot at around
70°C) and [parallel] ATA133. I'm willing to ditch my PC2100 RAM for higher
clocked chips to match a higher FSB, all other components will have to be
"transplanted" though.

Could somebody tell me which chipset I should go for, maybe even a
specific board/manufacturer? I've been out of touch with the development
of this segment since about 2002 when I put this PC together.

All suggestions will be greatly appreciated!
TIA,

Andrei

You can keep the memory no matter what chipset you get. You might look into
better cooling as they can start to make little errors above 60C.

Any chipset you can get these days will work with that cpu.


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In article
<. FU-Berlin.DE>, Serban
Andrei Dumitrescu <> wrote:

> Hi guys,
>
> to my greatest misfortune my computer's Epox mainboard said goodbye the
> other day, most likely cause being the bloated and partially leaking
> capacitors I discovered upon closer inspection.
>
> Now I need to get my PC up & running again asap, and was wondering what
> new mainboard I should get. I can't afford a more comprehensive upgrade
> right now, so it will have to be a board which supports my Athlon XP
> "2000+" (the salesperson said it was a T-Bred B, but I think it's rather
> an "A" because despite sufficient cooling it runs rather hot at around
> 70°C) and [parallel] ATA133. I'm willing to ditch my PC2100 RAM for higher
> clocked chips to match a higher FSB, all other components will have to be
> "transplanted" though.
>
> Could somebody tell me which chipset I should go for, maybe even a
> specific board/manufacturer? I've been out of touch with the development
> of this segment since about 2002 when I put this PC together.
>
> All suggestions will be greatly appreciated!
> TIA,
>
> Andrei

You can select "Socket A" here, and there are hundreds of
motherboards listed. My personal preference would be an
Nforce2 Ultra 400 based board.

http://www.motherboards.org/mobot/index.html

One problem when looking for motherboards now, is the
major brand name motherboards for Socket A (S462) are
becoming unavailable, and the lesser brands of motherboards
are all that you can find. For example, I would not buy
a Jetway board, if I found one of those. The problem
with some of these lesser brands of motherboards, is
they don't seem to be tested all that well, and there
are boards shipped that are "dead on arrival". So
be prepared for some surprises with your new purchase.

Paul

Serban Andrei Dumitrescu wrote:
>
Skip new and buy used if you are comfortable. In any case, nforce2 is a
good chipset to stick with.

-Dylan

> Hi guys,
>
> to my greatest misfortune my computer's Epox mainboard said goodbye the
> other day, most likely cause being the bloated and partially leaking
> capacitors I discovered upon closer inspection.
>
> Now I need to get my PC up & running again asap, and was wondering what
> new mainboard I should get. I can't afford a more comprehensive upgrade
> right now, so it will have to be a board which supports my Athlon XP
> "2000+" (the salesperson said it was a T-Bred B, but I think it's rather
> an "A" because despite sufficient cooling it runs rather hot at around
> 70°C) and [parallel] ATA133. I'm willing to ditch my PC2100 RAM for
> higher clocked chips to match a higher FSB, all other components will
> have to be "transplanted" though.
>
> Could somebody tell me which chipset I should go for, maybe even a
> specific board/manufacturer? I've been out of touch with the development
> of this segment since about 2002 when I put this PC together.
>
> All suggestions will be greatly appreciated!
> TIA,
>
> Andrei

Last I heard Epox was repairing their boards for only a small fee like $20.
Also you can tried this:
http://www.badcaps.com/
I had the same happen to my Epox but luckily I'm handy with a soldering iron
and replace them myself.

DaveL


"Serban Andrei Dumitrescu" <> wrote in message
news: DAT.FU-Berlin.DE...
>
> Hi guys,
>
> to my greatest misfortune my computer's Epox mainboard said goodbye the
> other day, most likely cause being the bloated and partially leaking
> capacitors I discovered upon closer inspection.
>
> Now I need to get my PC up & running again asap, and was wondering what
> new mainboard I should get. I can't afford a more comprehensive upgrade
> right now, so it will have to be a board which supports my Athlon XP
> "2000+" (the salesperson said it was a T-Bred B, but I think it's rather
> an "A" because despite sufficient cooling it runs rather hot at around
> 70°C) and [parallel] ATA133. I'm willing to ditch my PC2100 RAM for higher
> clocked chips to match a higher FSB, all other components will have to be
> "transplanted" though.
>
> Could somebody tell me which chipset I should go for, maybe even a
> specific board/manufacturer? I've been out of touch with the development
> of this segment since about 2002 when I put this PC together.
>
> All suggestions will be greatly appreciated!
> TIA,
>
> Andrei
>

On Thu, 2 Mar 2006, Paul wrote:

> In article
> <. FU-Berlin.DE>, Serban
> Andrei Dumitrescu <> wrote:
>
>> Hi guys,
>>
>> to my greatest misfortune my computer's Epox mainboard said goodbye the
>> other day, most likely cause being the bloated and partially leaking
>> capacitors I discovered upon closer inspection.
>>
>> Now I need to get my PC up & running again asap, and was wondering what
>> new mainboard I should get. I can't afford a more comprehensive upgrade
>> right now, so it will have to be a board which supports my Athlon XP
>> "2000+" (the salesperson said it was a T-Bred B, but I think it's rather
>> an "A" because despite sufficient cooling it runs rather hot at around
>> 70°C) and [parallel] ATA133. I'm willing to ditch my PC2100 RAM for higher
>> clocked chips to match a higher FSB, all other components will have to be
>> "transplanted" though.
>>
>> Could somebody tell me which chipset I should go for, maybe even a
>> specific board/manufacturer? I've been out of touch with the development
>> of this segment since about 2002 when I put this PC together.
>>
>> All suggestions will be greatly appreciated!
>> TIA,
>>
>> Andrei
>
> You can select "Socket A" here, and there are hundreds of
> motherboards listed. My personal preference would be an
> Nforce2 Ultra 400 based board.
>
> http://www.motherboards.org/mobot/index.html
>
> One problem when looking for motherboards now, is the
> major brand name motherboards for Socket A (S462) are
> becoming unavailable, and the lesser brands of motherboards
> are all that you can find. For example, I would not buy
> a Jetway board, if I found one of those. The problem
> with some of these lesser brands of motherboards, is
> they don't seem to be tested all that well, and there
> are boards shipped that are "dead on arrival". So
> be prepared for some surprises with your new purchase.

Does ASRock rank among these "lesser brands"? They abound around here rt
now, both with nforce2 and via chipsets, and aren't expensive either.

On the other hand, my confidence in "major brand" manufacturing was
somewhat shaken when the capacitors on my Epox board started leaking - I
thought Epox would have the decency to use capacitors manufactured by
original process.

Thanks for the link - I'll have a look at it right now.

Andrei

<snip>
> Could somebody tell me which chipset I should go for, maybe even a
> specific board/manufacturer? I've been out of touch with the development
> of this segment since about 2002 when I put this PC together.
>
> All suggestions will be greatly appreciated! TIA, Andrei

I have a lot of experience of Gigabyte Socket-A boards, and think that a
KT133A board such as the GA7VA would do the trick. You can sometimes buy
these secondhand (I have bought several from the "bargain basement" section
at www.aria.co.uk). I also have an example of the "all singing, all dancing"
GA7VAX Plus- Ultra board - the same basic board, plus SATA and PATA Raid,
Firewire etc. They go best if teamed with a decent graphics card, but not an
AGP 4X one, which cripples them (literally. If the voltage demand is wrong,
the boards are fried). I've also used the nForce based GA7N400Pro boards.
There are at least three versions - a Pro, a Pro2, and a Pro2 version 2.
They support the 400 fsb top end Athlon XPs, and have Firewire, SATA and
PATA Raid etc. All of the boards I mentioned support PC3200.

In my experience, you can't <<easily>> tell the difference between PC3200
and PC2700 or 2100 - or in the case of the nForce board, between single or
dual channel, or when using low latency (Corsair TwinX) RAM - nor very
easily what level of processor you have if you are simply running ordinary
Win applications or surfing -whatever difference there is is eclipsed by
whether or not you use a decent graphics card. So save your money for the
next major upgrade. You need a benchmark like Sandra to tell you the
difference - or a game. And before I wrote that I did compare an nForce with
XP3200 and TwinX to a KT133A with XP2000 and cheap RAM - and the difference
is detectable, but not very easily detectable. The lower spec machine is
still very usable.

I have also used the Asrock KT133A board (K7VT4A). But don't buy one second
hand as the I/O shield is unusual - and anyway, the boards are very cheap
new. They seem to be a bit faster than the Gigabyte equivalent. However, the
Gigabyte equivalent has more USB pinouts for front panel USB, so you can
have casefront ports AND a card reader. In this sense, the Via KT boards are
better than the nForce boards too.

Unlike the correspondent who doesn't like Jetway, I was very happy with
several Jetway 663AS boards (KT133) but they didn't like Soundblaster Live
cards - a problem that Jetway never fixed.

Regards

Eddie B.

I've used the Asrock KM266Pro based board, the micro-atx with integrated
video. It's only $40 at Newegg. I loved it. There are some recent reviews
there of dead on arrival ones, though. Could be users goofing them up. You
need to set the fsb jumper before starting up, and it comes set for 333, the
fastest. I think your cpu is 266, which requires removing the jumper.

You get the video, agp slot, usb 2, lan, a free modem -- it's nifty. Not
alot of room around the socket for large heatsinks, though.


--
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Serban Andrei Dumitrescu wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2 Mar 2006, Paul wrote:
>
>> In article
>> <. FU-Berlin.DE>, Serban
>> Andrei Dumitrescu <> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi guys,
>>>
>>> to my greatest misfortune my computer's Epox mainboard said goodbye the
>>> other day, most likely cause being the bloated and partially leaking
>>> capacitors I discovered upon closer inspection.
>>>
>>> Now I need to get my PC up & running again asap, and was wondering what
>>> new mainboard I should get. I can't afford a more comprehensive upgrade
>>> right now, so it will have to be a board which supports my Athlon XP
>>> "2000+" (the salesperson said it was a T-Bred B, but I think it's rather
>>> an "A" because despite sufficient cooling it runs rather hot at around
>>> 70°C) and [parallel] ATA133. I'm willing to ditch my PC2100 RAM for
>>> higher
>>> clocked chips to match a higher FSB, all other components will have
>>> to be
>>> "transplanted" though.
>>>
>>> Could somebody tell me which chipset I should go for, maybe even a
>>> specific board/manufacturer? I've been out of touch with the development
>>> of this segment since about 2002 when I put this PC together.
>>>
>>> All suggestions will be greatly appreciated!
>>> TIA,
>>>
>>> Andrei
>>
>>
>> You can select "Socket A" here, and there are hundreds of
>> motherboards listed. My personal preference would be an
>> Nforce2 Ultra 400 based board.
>>
>> http://www.motherboards.org/mobot/index.html
>>
>> One problem when looking for motherboards now, is the
>> major brand name motherboards for Socket A (S462) are
>> becoming unavailable, and the lesser brands of motherboards
>> are all that you can find. For example, I would not buy
>> a Jetway board, if I found one of those. The problem
>> with some of these lesser brands of motherboards, is
>> they don't seem to be tested all that well, and there
>> are boards shipped that are "dead on arrival". So
>> be prepared for some surprises with your new purchase.
>
>
> Does ASRock rank among these "lesser brands"? They abound around here rt
> now, both with nforce2 and via chipsets, and aren't expensive either.
>
> On the other hand, my confidence in "major brand" manufacturing was
> somewhat shaken when the capacitors on my Epox board started leaking - I
> thought Epox would have the decency to use capacitors manufactured by
> original process.
>
> Thanks for the link - I'll have a look at it right now.
>
> Andrei
Don't worry about the capacitor issue...its pretty common among boards
of that era from both major mfr's and smaller companies.

-Dylan

The capacitor thing was from somebody stealing a capacitor formula and his
company using it, except it was a faulty formula. They supplied lots of big
motherboard makers.

Though you still have to check your caps now and then on any board.
--
Ed Light

Smiley :-/
MS Smiley :-\

Send spam to the FTC at

Thanks, robots.

Bring the Troops Home:
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