Thinking about a Gigabyte GA-8KNXP. Need help!

I currently own an Athlon-based Soyo board I'm happy with and in the past I've
been an A-bit fan (not in a while though) and have never owned an MSI board.

Based on the recent Tom's Hardware round-up I was thinking of getting and MSI
865PE. However, I've gotten concerned because of many posts in the MSI group
about instability issues. That led me to the Gigabyte GA-8KNXP. I'm looking for
rock solid stability and as far as features, as long as the board has plenty of
USB ports and a LAN input I'm pretty fine. Firewire, card readers, RAID arrays,
etc., are all pretty useless to me.

Am I likely to find this move to be very stable? I don't really care too much
about overclocking. I might push the system a tiny bit but not much. Mainly want
it to improve my performance in Flight Sim 2004 from my Athlon XP 1800+ system.

What RAM (manufacturer and speed) should I be looking to? In the past I've had
great luck with Crucial ram. I would have just gotten 512mb. Should I look to at
least 1GB now?

Figured I might be able to get in and out around $500-$600 for the motherboard,
RAM and processor (say a 2.8GHz).

Lastly, I used to FAT32 and in the past I just hooked up my new components to my
old hard drive, booted to a command prompt, renamed the Windows directory to
say, winold and then installed the OS again from a directory that had the CD's
copied to it. Fast and efficient. I recently converted the main partition to
NTFS at the heavy recommendation of nearly everyone I know. I'm uncomfortable
with this as I now have NO clue how to go about re-installing the OS (XP Pro
which I own).

Do I just boot the CD and install over the same directory after replacing the
motherboard/processor/ram?

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

*** RTH ***

 

Excellent! I can't imagine what I'd use a RAID for as I have a single drive most
of the time thought right now I do have two 120GB drives and I'm not using the
second one.

512mb has served me extremely well with this system.

Stability problems? Massive speed issues? Should I forget about 875 boards over
this?

Interesting thought but I'm not using most of my 120GB and that's pretty rare,
plus I'd rather not have the additional cost when the need isn't essential.

*** RTH ***

 

This I didn't even realize was an option. Sounds good to me to consider. I'll
look into it, though "assembly" in this case is pushing the definition of the

I do like to get a truly clean registry every so often otherwise I would install
right over top. I have a couple of minor OS nits going on right now that seem
registry related and no cleaning to date has fixed it.

*** RTH ***

 

Rich Heimlich wrote:
| I currently own an Athlon-based Soyo board I'm happy with and in the
| past I've been an A-bit fan (not in a while though) and have never
| owned an MSI board.
|
| Based on the recent Tom's Hardware round-up I was thinking of getting
| and MSI 865PE. However, I've gotten concerned because of many posts
| in the MSI group about instability issues. That led me to the
| Gigabyte GA-8KNXP. I'm looking for rock solid stability and as far as
| features, as long as the board has plenty of USB ports and a LAN
| input I'm pretty fine. Firewire, card readers, RAID arrays, etc., are
| all pretty useless to me.
|
| Am I likely to find this move to be very stable? I don't really care
| too much about overclocking. I might push the system a tiny bit but
| not much. Mainly want it to improve my performance in Flight Sim 2004
| from my Athlon XP 1800+ system.
|
| What RAM (manufacturer and speed) should I be looking to? In the past
| I've had great luck with Crucial ram. I would have just gotten 512mb.
| Should I look to at least 1GB now?
|
| Figured I might be able to get in and out around $500-$600 for the
| motherboard, RAM and processor (say a 2.8GHz).
|
| Lastly, I used to FAT32 and in the past I just hooked up my new
| components to my old hard drive, booted to a command prompt, renamed
| the Windows directory to say, winold and then installed the OS again
| from a directory that had the CD's copied to it. Fast and efficient.
| I recently converted the main partition to NTFS at the heavy
| recommendation of nearly everyone I know. I'm uncomfortable with this
| as I now have NO clue how to go about re-installing the OS (XP Pro
| which I own).
|
| Do I just boot the CD and install over the same directory after
| replacing the motherboard/processor/ram?
|
| Any input would be greatly appreciated.
|
| *** RTH ***

Converting from FAT32 to NTFS can affect your performanc,
because it makes the cluster size too small.
Do one thing at a time.
1) Use sfc /purge cache then sfc /scannow. Test the results.
If this don't help go to 2.
2) Insert your XP CD and boot from it. Choose to install then
a message will come up sayng that XP found a copy and will
ask if you want to repair, choose yes. Test the results for a while.
if this don't help go to 3.
3) Boot from the XP CD and choose to delete the partition and
start from scratch.
Good Luck

 

As I used Partition Magic to do the switch I have correct cluster sizes
according to everything I've read and tested with.

I like fresh installs once in a while but like I said, in this case I'm not sure
how best to get that. I really like Windows called Windows (the folder) and
without being able to rename it, I'd have to re-install OVER it which is risky.
Might just install to a different folder and all it WinXP or something.

I'm always on as admin so that's lost on my system.



*** RTH ***