Need Help picking a new Athlon MP(X) motherboard

[d.co]

Well I just had my current Iwill MPX2 motherboard give up the ghost on me (continouse beep code indicating memory or vid card error. I know the vidcards fine and at least one of my two mighty sticks of ram HAS to be working as both compatible with the board so sayeth Crucial.

Anyhow I'm in the market for a new Amd MPX motherboard. I
m gonna stay away from the Iwill MPX2 because of the major hating I'm doing upon it right now (Iwill probably makes good products and I got unlucky or was uncareful... but regardless... once burned twice shy.)

I'm looking at two boards right now the


Tyan Tiger MPX (S2466N-4M)
Which is a nice built with no frills to be a Stable (server)motherboard.

it has two 10/100 NIC in it. which I can forgive. I plan on using one of them at least.

And the

Gigabyte GA-7DPXDW+

Which is much like the Tyan above except that it has but one NIC and it has onboard RAID. I don't intend on using the onboard Raid but, but I'm looking into the performance benifits of attaching each ATA device on its own seperate channel. (anyone know where I can look up this information? I could just spend ~40 bucks in the future for a ata100 card when I put in some scsi)

No matter what I do plan on adding a Scsi drive to boot from and a scsi scratch work drive. I intend on using this set up to well Rip and transcode DVD's in my spare time but for the most part this workstation (thats sorta lying broken right now Damn motherboard) will be used for some NLE type video work (premiere etc.) That being said I'm still a bit new to building computers so stablity is a must. Anyone here have any advice in that regard towards which mobo i should buy? Many thanks in advance.


Deeco.

[brashquido]

I was about to get a Dual CPU system a few months ago using the Gigabyte board, but that was more because it had the most impressive feature set of any Dual AMD board at the time, and I was intending to use the onboard RAID. From what I read the Tyan's are rock solid performers.

What I wrote doesn't really make your choice any easier, just shows I would've narrowed my choice down to the same boards as you have ;)

[d.co]

Well after weighing in some decisions... I ended up with the Tyan board.... I figured I'm using this computer (some of the time at least :)) for work purposes and it will be more important to go for STABLE than FLASHY. Haven't had a problem with it yet. My only issue now is my DAMN fans I added some coolermaster HHC-001 that have these hugeass vacuums for fans (well at least they sound like em) Oh well when I get some cash i'll replace them with something quieter. ITs not like you can run a duallie system without noise.


@brashquido
instead of a duallie what did you end up getting may I ask?

[brashquido]

I actually just got a single CPU Gigabyte KT333 based board. At the time my Canopus EZDV was listed as being incompatible with the MPX chipset. Now it isn't I see :angry:

[d.co]

Well i've been told that alot of digital video editing cards were incompatible with MPX boards.... MPX boards had a sort of break in period where things just needed to be ironed out (think USB problems). You'll rarely see me as an early adopter. i feel you get stabler and more affordable hardware if your willing to wait a bit for issues to be ironed out.


WEll theres always next time Man...

D.co