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Mobo dying .... suggestions please on upgrading my system ...

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Carol Haynes:
Oh, and for chipsets: there's only really two choices, intel and nvidia nforce. Stay away from everything else :)
-f0dder (November 03, 2006, 03:00 AM)
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What is wrong with VIA chipsets these days? Presumably the ATI chipsets are useful if you plan to use Radeon graphics - or is ATI suffering from its usual crap driver problem?

So are you suggesting AMD cpu + NVIDIA chipset + GEFORCE graphics is a better compbination these days than the Radeon cards. I haven't any experience with recent graphics cards - and my needs aren't great as I am not really into games, but I got the impression that ATI stuff was the leading graphics engine now?

f0dder:
Well, there might not be problems with VIA and ATI chipsets these days, but I've been burnt too many times - only seriously (VIA chipset + data corruption - I think this was on a k6-2 with VIA) once, but minor stuff like sub-par performance other times.

AMD CPU + NForce chipset + GeForce is probably the best bang for the buck at the moment, although the radeons have somewhat better shader performance. But that won't matter as you aren't a gamer :). I'm not touching ATi for a while, because of my bad experience with their drivers.

It's my (non-quantified :)) experience that intel tend to make the best chipsets (they have had some issues, but the last I heard about were several years back). I'm currently on AMD64x2 and NForce4, but I hope to get myself a core2duo and intel chipset before Q3 2007 (younger brother needs a new box, might as well inherit mine and give me an excuse for getting a new one :)).

For my old P4 system, I got an... SIS, I think... chipset because it supported faster RAM. Funny enough, though, the intel chipset at the time that had slower ram support outperformed the system - and the onboard raid was unstable, giving data corruption when reaching high speeds on striping (only ~5 bytes in a gig of data, but that's bad enough).

Depending on your graphics needs, if you decide to get a new box, onboard graphics might be good enough for you - it's not as shabby as it used to be.

Eóin:
Was this a 64bit version of 7zip (sounds like it)? And which compiler was used for compiling it? x86-64 is still pretty new, so not all compilers are very mature yet. Embarassing that performance is *worse*, considering the new registers etc.
-f0dder (November 03, 2006, 03:00 AM)
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Yep 64bit exe on 64bit XP v 32bit exe on 32bit XP. It is possible that the newer version of 7zip are a bit better, I think I'll run the tests again when I get back to that box after the weekend, might post some results if they are interesting (don't worry not in this thread Carol, don't mean to bring things off topic :) ).

dk70:
You should separate "brands" into good buys or not so good buys instead of xxx is crap. Does not hold much water. Look at the whole range of products, then select and compare - find pros and cons. History is few months with these things. Nvidia hardware/drivers have one too. Even NF4. A major feature was hardware based firewall, yeah right. Speaking of useless drivers/software and corruption not much beat that. Rest is fine but nothing is perfect. NF2 also has history of data corruption btw. still the first really good chipset for AMD cpu and overclockers :) Dont be loyal to brands or listen to old ATI or whatever stories (f0dders  :D ) I loved old VIA chipset from KT133 to KT333 because they were so tweakable - also was nightmare for many not so interested in fiddling (about the time where Intel was boring but ever so "stable" as opposed to... - then came Nvidia and saved buyers/AMD). Go to Nvidias official forum and look for tears and sweat and find same stories you might read about ATI/VIA, ups and downs and it continues.

Seems to me all the big players share market between them while laughing 8) Conspiracy. When someone like ULI comes along and make much cheaper chipsets, but with competitive and unique features, they are quickly bought up by one of the oldies. Prefer fixed environment, not too much innovation. Small steps so not to disturb upgrade logic. They all want your money.

Also remember when it comes to motherboards much is decided by maker not only chipset provider. They select components, how much they will support before moving on etc. They get a reference bios but up to maker to adjust specific product - some spend more hours on that than others. Again you will see same pattern, some products nice - others only give problems. Asus, MSI, Abit or whoever dont really matter. Dont make sense to dismiss X or praise Z in general terms - none of them deserve that. There is only changing good and not so good buys.

Example from real life. My sister got a Nvidia 6600GT video card. On VIA KT600 chipset graphics are corrupted big time in 3D, but only in D3D - Opengl is fine. Look it up on Nvidia forum, 6600GT stories are not all positive even if a big seller for Nvidia. Too lazy to find link but the thread about 6600GT is 10 mile long... Well, nothing worked so I changed motherboard to NF2 and voila perfect 3D in all modes. Does that make VIA crap for the xx time? Do all 6600GT cards blow on that chipset? Not necessarily, get used to "issues" ;)

f0dder:
Hm yeah, the hardware firewall thing was extremely unstable - too bad, was a cute idea. Oh, and not only was it unstable, the it required a local install of the Apache web server for configuration - like, wtf?

And yes dk70, you're right about looking at specific products instead of a more coarse-grained blaime/praise thing. Personally, I just stay away from a few brands because I've had nasty problems with them... takes a while to regain trust, etc. :)

Oh, and while I'm not particularly pleased about the unstable ATi drivers, I do have to say that their multimonitor stuff is a bit better than nvidia - at least if you use rotation. When you enable rotation on a nvidia gpu, it feels as if the desktop that you rotate disables hardware acceleration...

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