Can some of you experts please chime in with your advice on which to purchase? I'm sure many of you on here have these motherboards and RAM and would have valuable input for my purchase.
I was leaning towards the MSI K8N Neo4. It looks like I have to go with the Platinum to get the Ultra. The Neo4 -F doesn't have the NF4 Ultra chip.
The downsides I'm seeing on the reviews are two.
1) the northbridge fan is LOUD
2) Funky memory configuration. From the manual I saw, it looked like if you ran in dual channel you could only run 333mhz. Then I heard some people just populating the first two slots and running at 400mhz... but are they running dual channel at that point? I am unclear here.... and maybe running 400mhz non-dual channel is way better than 333mhz dual channel.
I'd like to hear from some ppl here with real experience that know what they are talking about.
The other board I am seriously considering is the Abit AN8 Ultra. It seems like there are a lot of varieties and similar boards out there. I don't need all the firewire and dual LAN. But.. if there is an advantage to Ultra over non-Ultra I'd want to get that advantage.
I haven't heard too many downsides.
Some mentioned needing a longer floppy cable.
It looked like some of these boards were passively cooled with heat piping and some weren't. I didn't know the difference in models.
Then there is the matter of RAM. I'm looking to get 2 Gigs of performance RAM. I was thinking the Corsair Twinx2048-3200C2
I do not know the difference between San Diego and Venice.
I thought San Diego was FX, but I see some Athlon 64 3800's that are designated San Diego.
I was thinking I could probably swing a processor around 3000 or 3800.
Some input on which processor speed overclocks well with one of these motherboards and specific RAM would be valued information.
So, I'm looking at getting MB, RAM, CPU, and depending on how those costs come out I'll get either a 6800Ultra or a 7800 for video. Hoping to keep the upgrade around 1-1.5k.
Specific information about a combination of motherboard, CPU, RAM (which slots, timings, etc) would be great. Especially if you've overclocked it. Overclock with the included software?
I picked those boards because they got good performance ratings in the last motherboard benchmarks at tomshardware. The DFI was listed in there too, but to simplify matters I thought I would limit it to the MSI and the Abit since I have experience with those two brands in the past.
Thanks a lot guys I really appreciate the time put into responses.