Hi. my brothers friend is building a pc. So far he has 512 of some generic RAM, Western Digital Caviar 120gig, Radeon 9800 pro 128meg and a Barton 3000+ (is it worth paying the extra 20 quid for a 3200+ because its 400fsb?) He wants to know which would be better out of these to boards? I know they are both pretty evenly matched, but im sure some guru's here could nit pick to reveal the superior, so which is better? Hes a pretty keen gamer, not to interested in overclocking and does a lot of word processing, wants it to last the next year.

Thanks

Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe

Go for the Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe, I have one and it runs flawless. On the other hand my best freind is running a Abit NF7, and had had a few problems with it and had to get the motherboard replaced, after that it ran fine. I personally am an Asus fan, but I know many are also Abit, if he is going to just game once in a while and word processes he should be fine with either one. As for the 3200+ vs the 3000+, if he had the extra money go for the 3200+ with the 400mhz FSb, but that all depends on the speed of the ram he bought, if he has pc2700 ram go for the 3000+ if its pc3200 or higher, go for the 3200+.

Hope that helps somewhat, I know other will post with more specs on the Abit, I don't know much about it... I'm a diehard Asus fan!

Bill

Cheers for info, i got him the RAM from a computer fair, 65quid for DDR400

The A7N8X-E has Gigabit Ethernet & two NICs in all.

If he's not much into overclocking & unless he has a need for Gigabit, either board will suit him fine ( & I believe the Abit is less expensive ).

What are NIC's? What is the Gigabit part of ethernet and what makes it so good. (A nice demonstration of my tech ignorance if i do say so myself)

Taken from Compnetworking

Gigabit is a new network speed standard which is now available to end users. You have 10Mbit, 100Mbit & Gigabit.

It's nice to have but completely useless unless you have switches & all the machines on your network also support Gigabit, otherwise the NIC will lower its speed to the slowest component of the network.

Cheers, he'll probs just get the ASUS one, the features might come in handy sometime. Thanks for the info

Asus motherboards do not like Generic RAM.

The suff comes with a years warrantee, so if there is any problems we can just get our money back and buy somthing better. He could probably get some better RAM, but for the stuff hes gonna be doing i dont think having some dual channel low latency RAM costing 250 quid is really needed for a bit of casual gaming and a load of word processing. No point in buying needlessly expensive stuff if your never gonna fill its potential.

The nForce chipsets in general don't like generic ram - its not a Asus specific thing. It is always a good idea to buy your ram from a decent source.....especally when using an nforce chipset - they appear to be more fussy than most.

Steg