Legit Reviews

Hi

I have a A8R-MVP which I've had enough of, and I've decided to upgrade it for Vista and so i can use all of my 4GB Ram as I can never get the ram working with the A8R-MVP.

can anyone recommend a board please?

I don't need 2 graphics card slots, but I do need something that will hold my X1900 and still have min 2PCI slots free (would be nice to have a 3rd), min 6x USB2.0, Gigabit LAN and Min 4xSATAII.

This will be only my second mobo, so although I do want to try and overclock it, I don't think I want something like a DFI that goes OTT with options.

Ideally I'd like something that has good cooling, but if not the swiftech can keep it cool.

Thanks in advance for any replies

Are you just upgrading to specifically get the 4GB of RAM to recognise? Because if you are you don't need to. 32-Bit OS's (like the WinXP your probably using now) can't see all the 4GB of the RAM (due to the addressing limitations of 32Bit), so all you'd need to do to be able to utilise all of the 4GB would be to upgrade straight to a 64-bit OS, as the board supports 64-bit processors and OS's.

Dan

Thanks for the reply. No, I'm upgrading as the A8R-MVP has caused me no end of problems and when upgrading to Vista will be a good time for a fresh start as I'm going to do a fresh build.

dfi lanparty sli-dr is a great board for socket 939. You can get it pretty cheap now (~100) I think.

thanks - will check it out

The newer Asus (ATI Based) board is sweet (the one in my sig)

It's super stable and a good overclocker! Not too expensive either.
DFI is cool, I had the SLI-DR and Expert boards, they can be a bitch to config in some case though.

I had my eye on the newer Asus, but I was worried I'd have the same problems as the A8R-MVP got good reviews initially.

I'm going to buy the the Asus, as the DFI etc may be great, but they are probably too fiddly.

Thanks mate

just seen that it has a PCIe LAN for true 1GB networking. If I'd known about this before I would have bought. Getting credit card out right now......

I personally prefer passive cooling, and wouldn't buy a board with a fan. Over time they become loud and annoying as hell.

I got a asrock dual-vsta for under $70 and it has pci-express x16 slot and an agp. It is meant for overclocking and tweaking. it has a future slot which allows you to hook in a board and use am2 slot and ddr2 on the board. It is a sweet board.

I can sympathize, the A8R-POS is a flaky board. It took me a month of fiddling to get a stable overclock. I've come to the conclusion that the voltage regulation isn't tight enough. It's worst right at start up - preventing most overclocks from even booting. I ended up setting the memory and HT multipliers in the BIOS then using Clockgen to set the FSB. Surprisingly the board managed 320FSB - more than enough to get a 2.8GHz out of an Opti 165. All the same, I would have went with almost any of the 3200's if I'd known what a pain in the ass this board was going to be.