Does this motherboard exist?

[jim1595]

With all of my recent upgrades to my computer my PCI bus has sort of gotten a bit taxed. I've now running my hard drives, a NIC, a tv card, and my sound card. As of now, it stutters occasionally during heavy processing such as a new game. So, anyway, i was wondering if anyone on this board owns or has come across a motherboard that fits my criteria.

-Prefferably an nVIDIA chipset as there always seem to be driver issues and whatnot with my via chipsets (however, i haven't really followed this in a while so if things have changed or the nforce chipsets have just as many problems please let me know)

-Socket A CPU slot - preferably not surrounded by large capacitors as i have the zalman flower heatsink that sort of fans out and can get in the way if things get too close and also i prefer the mounting tabs to be vertical (at the top and bottom) since if it is horizonal it tends to block a DIMM or two

-DDR400 - Prefferably dual channel for future upgrades

-Onboard ethernet

-AGP 8x - new video card :)

-4 ide slots - (This is a nescesity as i have 3 hard drives and 3 cdrom drives) These would preferably be ata133 just because i'd like to have support for my drive over 136 Gb without any goofy install disks.

I think that's about it. I'd like to thank anyone who actually read this entire long-winded post and anyone who posts their suggestions. Also, if there are any BIOS or registry tweaks that might help alleviate a bit of this in the mean time i'd be interested to hear them. Thank you.

[TotalChaos]

you mention your PCI being overtaxed by add in cards. No athlon board is going to change this. onboard or off board: IDE controllers, additional RAID chips, and many other devices are going to share the PCI bus. Untill PCI express comes your out of luck. I also can't imagine why a game would be affected by any of this unless you were capturing video at the same time. Only boards with network connections directly to the northbridge are going to relieve any PCI bottleneck. To my knowledge only intel (CSA) and soon to be released boards from nvidia are implementing this.

[bit-wise]

I've had a lot of luck with ABIT motherboards. Last time I was on their site looking for a new motherboard, they had detailed photos of each one - enough to determine if there is enough clearance around the CPU socket.

[jim1595]

Totalchaos, that's interesting, i've always assumed that all onboard parts were directly connected to the northbridge or at least had a better data pipeline than the pci bus.

Thanks bit-wise, I've given some thought to the Abit AN7. Everything looks pretty well layed out except i'll probably run into the same problem i have now since i have a long video card i'll have to remove it whenever i want to change RAM. I don't recall a board that isn't set up like that nowadays anyway so it's not that big a deal.

[TotalChaos]

To clarify my above post; no 'socket A' mobo is going to fix your PCI bottle neck. To my knowledge there are no chipsets for athlon, athlon XP that have direct northbridge LANs. the nforce2 ultra or whatever the their latest model is does have powerful audio capabilities with on-chip proccessing. This could relieve some PCI bottle neck since the CPU will not be require to do many audio calculations. Most onboard peripherals are nothing more then additional chips connected to the southbridge by means of the PCI bus. You would probably be happier with a Nvidia chipset for Athlon64 or 857/865 Intel chipset for P4. Guess your just upgrading the mobo for an AthlonXP though?

[jim1595]

As tempting as it is to upgrade to an athlon 64 i don't think the pocketbook has enough mileage to pull it off... for now at least :) . You're correct, right now i'm running a 1600+ which i believe uses the Thoroughbreed (sp) core. I might just upgrade to a Barton core athlon processor when i find a good deal since I think the main cause of the slowdowns is actually the CPU. Also, i've improved the problems a bit by switching my mouse over to the ps2 port and lowering the latency on my memory. Thanks again for the time and advice, it was very helpful.