how choose suitable motherboard?

[lugoteehalt]

Have no experience building computers and very confused about choice of components.

Best to choose motherboard first?

Read, slightly unhelpful, tutorial: Motherboard should:

Give variety of future upgrade paths

AGP slot

Good room for memory, ?DDR-DRAM

Any built in sound, etc, should be switch-off-able

Board layout, e.g. should be nothing in the way of the CPU fan

Manual in good English

Well known brand

Chipset is the hub - 'do research' [don't understand the tecnical stuff]

Support for a wide range of processors (should think processor should be perhaps 1GHz fast or better)

Anyone know something suitable? Thanks any help.

[JayMan8081]

I think you'll get a wide variety of answers to this. I would recommend going with a motherboard from Giga-Byte. They have good features, great website for support, and a wide variety of boards for almost any processor currently available. My current motherboard has built-in 1000MB lan, 6 channel audio, supports 8 USB 2.0, and 2 FireWire ports. All in all I've always been pleased with Giga-Byte motherboards.

[lugoteehalt]

Thanks:)

Any advice about understanding the technical stuff?

[AngryPuppy]

So, have you settled on an AMD or Intel processor yet? This will definitely impact the coice you make for a motherboard.

As far as technical knowledge, you are really doing what needs to be done. You are researching the topic.

You might consider taking advantage of a brick and mortar store to make your purchases if you want to do this with a minimum of research. The shopowner can then help guide your purchases. The down side is that they are considerably more expensive than deals you can find online. Even if you don't buy from them, you can pretend to have interest in what they sell... pretend to be interested in a particular board and they can tell you what hardware is best suited to work with that board.


Even after you build your first computer, you will have to continue learning for each new machine you build. I've built many now, and I'm finding that there are new things to learn about the new technologies every time.


Personally, I would determine what processor I wanted to run first and then go from there.


Terry

[AngryPuppy]

By the way, if you choose to go with AMD for a processor (my personal preference) I would consider an NVidia NForce chipset rather than a VIA chipset on the motherboard.


Terry

[lugoteehalt]

Right thanks, that's very helpful indeed.:) I'll visit a shop.

[kevinatkins]

hi,

just my experience of using an MSI Via KT400-based board (about a year old now, so things will have moved on..)...

not good.

with this board (it's on my father's machine), we've had lots of problems with the IDE interface, specifically CD-ROMs.. it appears it might be be a problem with DMA specific to the Via chipset.. Googling around, and others are in the same boat. I've been unable to install a number of the newer distros on this machine - specifically, Fedora Core 3, Mandrake 10.1, Ubuntu... because one of the CD-ROMs seems to just 'hang' after a while, taking everything with it... and it's not the drive - we've replaced it once already, with a decent Pioneer item..It's possible that there's an actual fault on the mobo..

Via do offer Linux support and drivers on their website, but it's not particularly well laid out.

It was a cheap machine, with a cheap motherboard - with hindsight, not a good choice..

Do your research

[lugoteehalt]

Thanks, I'll avoid it.

Do your research is easilly said.:)

[ph34r]

Using a MSI K7D "Master-L" board now - dual athlon cpus, sound and nic work fine in Linux, up to 4gb ram, 3 PCI and one agp slot. My previous board was a Tyan Tiger 100 (dual P2/3). Very happy with both.

[The Coder]

I am building a new PC as I speak. Defenetly go to newegg (http://www.newegg.com) . It wasn't only an online store for me but almost like a library where I learned about what products exist in the current market and very helpful user reviews. ALso I have been reading about new hardware technology like crazy for a month.

[lugoteehalt]

Thanks :) Probably only need one CPU.