Motherboard Recomendation at DVinfo.net

Chad Solo · May 4th, 2005, 11:13 AM

I have a AMD 2800XP with a Asus A7N8X-E Motherbaord and I want to upgrade to a pentuim 4 3.0 and I'm not sure what motherboard to get. I have read so many reviews and all that makes me more confused. I guess I want a board that has PCI express but then I want it to have a agp slot because I have a Powercolor 9800pro video card and I just bought it last summer and don't want to get rid of it yet. This is the cpu I will be getting intel Pentium 4 630 Prescott 800MHz FSB 2MB L2 Cache LGA 775 Processor . I use Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 and starting to learn vegas. So if anyone has any Recomendation's I would very much appreciate it.

Thank's
Chad

K. Forman · May 4th, 2005, 12:31 PM

I recently got talked into buying 2 MSI KN7 Delta boards. So far, everything works ok, except the floppy drives. I went to their tech support, and they deny any bugs. Of course, I suppose it is just a coincidence that there are a hundred other folks posting the same problem on the message boards. There is really only one way to install a floppy, making it next to impossible to flub up.

As far as Asus, I will never buy another product from them. I bought one of their boards a few years back, and it had a dead USB. After several unanswered emails, and even a long distance call to the HQ in Taiwan (nobody answered the phone, not even an answering machine), I gave up. If tech support sucks, so will the product.

I have had good luck with Abit, and their techs are on the ball. Next time I upgrade, I'll be going back to Abit.

Christopher Lefchik · May 4th, 2005, 01:32 PM

Chad,

Going from an AMD 2800XP to a Pentium 3Ghz is a such a very small jump in speed I'm not sure I'd recommend spending the money on it. I would either recommend getting a faster chip (perhaps 3.6Ghz), or if you don’t want to spend that much, it may just be better to add more RAM to your current computer.

Keith,

My experience with Asus support was the opposite of yours. I thought I had a problem with my Asus motherboard last summer, and I had no problem at all arranging an RMA. In fact, when I first submitted my problem online I got an e-mail response in eight minutes with some troubleshooting tips. I then contacted them a little later that afternoon by phone and arranged the RMA, no probleml.

(They replaced it, but as it turned out, I don't think there was actually a problem with the motherboard after all. As I discovered, it's just some quirk with my RT.X100 where I have to disable my USB ports to capture/export to avoid some intermittent blockiness).

Christopher Lefchik · May 4th, 2005, 02:11 PM

Whoops, I didn't realize the Pentium 4 6xx series were Intel's new 64 bit chips. That, combined with the 2MB L2 cache, would give you a boost, though I'm still not sure how much over the Athlon XP 2800+. I'd still recommend going higher if you can. What is your budget?

You also might want to consider one of the new dual core processors from AMD or Intel. See http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1788685,00.asp. Right now the prices are high, but if you are willing to wait some they will come down.

Chad Solo · May 4th, 2005, 02:15 PM

Thank's guys for the replies. This setup I have now seems very slow maybe it's how I have it setup but it always seems slow to me. I thought going with a pentuim Hyper threading cpu will be a big difference in rendering times and editing. I already have 1 gig of ram I guess I can always use more. My XP2800 isn't the speed allot less like a 2100 they just mark them that why and the Pentuim 3.0 is the true core speed? Thank's again for the replies.

Christopher Lefchik · May 4th, 2005, 02:28 PM

Chad,

If you compare the core speed of the Athlon XP 2800+ (2.1Ghz) to the speed of a 2.8 Ghz Pentium 4 on paper you would think the Pentium was much faster. But in the real world the Athlon performs just as fast, if not faster, than the Pentium 4. I think Intel finally started acknowledging this by naming their processors with numbers (e.g., 630).

Hyperthreading helps some, especially during multitasking and/or if a program is optimized for it, like Premiere Pro is. Even with that the Pentium 4's don't necessarily run faster than an AMD processor. It depends on the task and program.

If you give us a detailed breakdown of your system we might be able to help with recommedations on how to improve performance. Maybe some upgrades to your existing system could help.

Chad Solo · May 4th, 2005, 02:31 PM

Just read the article it was a good read. I love to get a Duel core but thats a little out of my budget at this time. I guess if I was doing this as a business I would spring for it but it's a hobby at the moment.

thank's
chad

Chad Solo · May 4th, 2005, 02:40 PM

Thank's for helping out I really appreciate it. here's what I have

Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe ACPI BIOS REV 1008
512 Crucial Memory 3200 Dual Channel
2-80 gig wd 7200 Drives
Nec 2500a DVDRW Drive
2800 Athlon Barton CP
POWERCOLOR|RADEON9800 PRO 128M

My last computer was a 1400 Athlon and I didn't see much of a jump when I built this one. I'm not to good at Bios stuff and what I should set it at I don't overclock it's beyond me lol. There is just so many settings in the Bios especially the cpu and memory page I think I have it set at aggressive now.

Chad

Christopher Lefchik · May 4th, 2005, 03:01 PM

Your system looks pretty good. I'm not sure why it would feel slow to you. Does it feel slow all the time, or only during certain tasks? I could maybe understand Premiere Pro being a bit slow, but Vegas should hum along just fine on your system.

Do you have a lot of extraneous programs installed? E-mail? Antivirus? If at all possible you should avoid surfing the Internet and installing other programs besides your editing programs. Some people manage to get along fine doing all those things on their editing computers, but it's only asking for trouble.

And I assume by “512 Crucial Memory 3200 Dual Channel” you mean two sticks of 512MB RAM, since you said earlier you had 1 Gigabyte of RAM. Am I right?

Chad Solo · May 4th, 2005, 03:18 PM

Yes I have 1 -512 and 2-256

Christopher Lefchik · May 4th, 2005, 04:50 PM

What about the other programs? Do you have other things installed (antivirus, etc,) besides the editing programs? Does it feel slow all the time, or only when editing? If when editing, is it just Premiere Pro, or is it Vegas as well?

Chad Solo · May 4th, 2005, 05:03 PM

Yes I have anti Virus running and the computer just don't feel fast like it should be. I was at my aunts last week and was on her computer and it flew I'm not sure what it was and she wasn't sure what she has but it was very fast. Like adobe Photo on my computer when I go and open up the browser and view my raw files and it's slow I would think it would be allot faster then it is. I made a backup copy of one of my kids DVD last week and used the cce method it took almost 24 hours to render it when most people on this one forum says it should take 4 to 5 hours. I reinstalled everything and made sure much of nothing is starting up when windows reboots. I don't mind upgrading I will hand this CPU motherboard combo to my son and his to my younger son. So they are just waiting lol.

chad

Christopher Lefchik · May 4th, 2005, 07:41 PM

Your motherboard supports up to a 3.2Ghz AMD Athlon XP, so one option would be to upgrade the processor you have and keep your current motherboard (which looks to be a nice one, from what I saw on the Asus site). You could also get a couple sticks of 512MB PC3200 RAM from Crucial to upgrade your RAM to 1.5Gb.

AMD Athlon XP 3200+ ($150, OEM): http://www2.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16819103391
Crucial 512MB RAM ($55 each): http://www.crucial.com/store/PartSpe...64Z40B&cat=RAM

You could sell your old components on Ebay to help recoup some of the costs.

If, on the other hand, you decide to go the route of a both a new processor and motherboard, I would definitely recommend getting something faster than the 3.0Ghz Pentium 4. If you didn't think the bump from your old Athlon 1400 to your Athlon 2800 was much, then you certainly aren't going to be much impressed going to the 3Ghz Pentium 4.

Either the AMD or the Intel 64 bit processors would be a good choice. Whichever you choose, as I said earlier I'd recommend at least a 3.6Ghz. If you plan on doing a lot of work with Premiere Pro you might want to lean towards a Pentium 4, since Premiere is optimized for it. That said, many people are happily running Premiere Pro on AMD processors.

Your motherboard will depend on whether you choose AMD or Intel. I haven't kept up with motherboards so I'm afraid I can't give you any advice there. I'd recommend looking at the reviews on Extreme Tech (http://www.extremetech.com/category2/0,1556,285,00.asp) and Tom's Hardware (http://www.tomshardware.com/motherboard/index.html). Maybe someone with more knowledge can give some recommendations here. Be aware that the newer motherboards use the new DDR2 RAM.

And of course get plenty of RAM, at least a gigabyte or more.

I'm still puzzled by the poor performance of your current setup. It seems like it should be running better. Perhaps someone with a similar computer could chime in with their experience/recommendations.

Christopher Lefchik · May 4th, 2005, 08:55 PM

If you go the route of the new processor/motherboard (basically a new computer) then check out this recent thread we had on the subject of building a new computer: http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=43484. You'll get some good information on the subject.

Glenn Chan · May 4th, 2005, 11:31 PM

AMD's numbering system:
From about 2100+ and below, and AMD xxxx is about equivalent to a Pentium of x.xxx ghz clock speed. Above that, Intel kept getting faster while AMD didn't really catch up. However, Intel came out with a 3.2ghz processor (with hyperthreading and faster front side bus) and AMD responded by releasing a "3200+".

Anyways:
A- Ghz is an excellent way to compare relate speeds of processors, provided that you are comparing within the same processor line with the same features and everything. Among Intel, you have Celeron, Celeron D, Pentium A, B* (where the top 3.06ghz has HT whereas the rest of the B line does not), C, E, and EE and more versions and now it's the undescriptive numbering system. You can't compare those processors against each other.

B- Intel is definitely faster than the Barton AMD processors. At MPEG2 encoding, they have SSE2 (and now SSE3) optimizations which give them quite a boost. One benchmark I saw showed Intel was ~3X faster. AMD64 processors narrow the gap considerably and are in the same ballpark. They support the SSE2 instruction set and the dual cores will support SSE3.

At Vegas, Intel and AMD have always run neck to neck at rendertest.veg (intel with a slight lead in most cases). Hyperthreading may slow or improve performance with Vegas 6, so for that particular program it doesn't help. HT does improve MPEG2 encoding times (by 20% or something with the Main Concept encoder DVD architect supposedly uses... I don't know about CCE).

C-Norton Antivirus may be slowing down your computer. Try turning real-time scanning off? (You can still have it scan your system every night. And be sure to scan emails.)

NAV happens to be one of the slowest-scanning AV programs out there... it may explain why your computer takes a long time to boot and why programs take a little longer to open. It may not explain other behaviour though (i.e. slow rendering speed).

D- Are you drives over 85% full? If so, try defragging.

E- For dual channel platforms (all Intel, some AMD64, AMD XP is supposedly dual channel with some chipsets but dual channel doesn't actually do anything), optimal memory configuration is pairs of the exact same model + capacity RAM. This may make a small difference in rendering speed (a few percent... on other applications maybe as high as 20%?).
If you benchmark your new system against others and there is a small discrepancy, this may be why.
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...id=37831<br />
AMD64 is a different beast than Intel... it may be picky about RAM (i.e. certain RAM just won't work?; haven't been following this stuff close enough) and may not be as sensitive to having an optimal memory configuration as the Intel platform is.

F- If you want to use your old RAM, avoid boards/chipsets that only take DDR2 RAM.

May 4th, 2005, 11:13 AM	#1
Chad Solo Regular Crew Join Date: May 2004 Location: St.Petersburg,Fla Posts: 162	Motherboard Recomendation I have a AMD 2800XP with a Asus A7N8X-E Motherbaord and I want to upgrade to a pentuim 4 3.0 and I'm not sure what motherboard to get. I have read so many reviews and all that makes me more confused. I guess I want a board that has PCI express but then I want it to have a agp slot because I have a Powercolor 9800pro video card and I just bought it last summer and don't want to get rid of it yet. This is the cpu I will be getting intel Pentium 4 630 Prescott 800MHz FSB 2MB L2 Cache LGA 775 Processor . I use Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 and starting to learn vegas. So if anyone has any Recomendation's I would very much appreciate it. Thank's Chad

May 4th, 2005, 12:31 PM	#2
K. Forman Capt. Quirk Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Middle of the woods in Georgia Posts: 3,596	I recently got talked into buying 2 MSI KN7 Delta boards. So far, everything works ok, except the floppy drives. I went to their tech support, and they deny any bugs. Of course, I suppose it is just a coincidence that there are a hundred other folks posting the same problem on the message boards. There is really only one way to install a floppy, making it next to impossible to flub up. As far as Asus, I will never buy another product from them. I bought one of their boards a few years back, and it had a dead USB. After several unanswered emails, and even a long distance call to the HQ in Taiwan (nobody answered the phone, not even an answering machine), I gave up. If tech support sucks, so will the product. I have had good luck with Abit, and their techs are on the ball. Next time I upgrade, I'll be going back to Abit. __________________ www.SmokeWagonLeather.us

May 4th, 2005, 01:32 PM	#3
Christopher Lefchik Trustee Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: US Posts: 1,152	Chad, Going from an AMD 2800XP to a Pentium 3Ghz is a such a very small jump in speed I'm not sure I'd recommend spending the money on it. I would either recommend getting a faster chip (perhaps 3.6Ghz), or if you don’t want to spend that much, it may just be better to add more RAM to your current computer. Keith, My experience with Asus support was the opposite of yours. I thought I had a problem with my Asus motherboard last summer, and I had no problem at all arranging an RMA. In fact, when I first submitted my problem online I got an e-mail response in eight minutes with some troubleshooting tips. I then contacted them a little later that afternoon by phone and arranged the RMA, no probleml. (They replaced it, but as it turned out, I don't think there was actually a problem with the motherboard after all. As I discovered, it's just some quirk with my RT.X100 where I have to disable my USB ports to capture/export to avoid some intermittent blockiness).

May 4th, 2005, 02:11 PM	#4
Christopher Lefchik Trustee Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: US Posts: 1,152	Whoops, I didn't realize the Pentium 4 6xx series were Intel's new 64 bit chips. That, combined with the 2MB L2 cache, would give you a boost, though I'm still not sure how much over the Athlon XP 2800+. I'd still recommend going higher if you can. What is your budget? You also might want to consider one of the new dual core processors from AMD or Intel. See http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1788685,00.asp. Right now the prices are high, but if you are willing to wait some they will come down.

May 4th, 2005, 02:15 PM	#5
Chad Solo Regular Crew Join Date: May 2004 Location: St.Petersburg,Fla Posts: 162	Thank's guys for the replies. This setup I have now seems very slow maybe it's how I have it setup but it always seems slow to me. I thought going with a pentuim Hyper threading cpu will be a big difference in rendering times and editing. I already have 1 gig of ram I guess I can always use more. My XP2800 isn't the speed allot less like a 2100 they just mark them that why and the Pentuim 3.0 is the true core speed? Thank's again for the replies.

May 4th, 2005, 02:28 PM	#6
Christopher Lefchik Trustee Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: US Posts: 1,152	Chad, If you compare the core speed of the Athlon XP 2800+ (2.1Ghz) to the speed of a 2.8 Ghz Pentium 4 on paper you would think the Pentium was much faster. But in the real world the Athlon performs just as fast, if not faster, than the Pentium 4. I think Intel finally started acknowledging this by naming their processors with numbers (e.g., 630). Hyperthreading helps some, especially during multitasking and/or if a program is optimized for it, like Premiere Pro is. Even with that the Pentium 4's don't necessarily run faster than an AMD processor. It depends on the task and program. If you give us a detailed breakdown of your system we might be able to help with recommedations on how to improve performance. Maybe some upgrades to your existing system could help.

May 4th, 2005, 02:31 PM	#7
Chad Solo Regular Crew Join Date: May 2004 Location: St.Petersburg,Fla Posts: 162	Just read the article it was a good read. I love to get a Duel core but thats a little out of my budget at this time. I guess if I was doing this as a business I would spring for it but it's a hobby at the moment. thank's chad

May 4th, 2005, 02:40 PM	#8
Chad Solo Regular Crew Join Date: May 2004 Location: St.Petersburg,Fla Posts: 162	Thank's for helping out I really appreciate it. here's what I have Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe ACPI BIOS REV 1008 512 Crucial Memory 3200 Dual Channel 2-80 gig wd 7200 Drives Nec 2500a DVDRW Drive 2800 Athlon Barton CP POWERCOLOR\|RADEON9800 PRO 128M My last computer was a 1400 Athlon and I didn't see much of a jump when I built this one. I'm not to good at Bios stuff and what I should set it at I don't overclock it's beyond me lol. There is just so many settings in the Bios especially the cpu and memory page I think I have it set at aggressive now. Chad

May 4th, 2005, 03:01 PM	#9
Christopher Lefchik Trustee Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: US Posts: 1,152	Your system looks pretty good. I'm not sure why it would feel slow to you. Does it feel slow all the time, or only during certain tasks? I could maybe understand Premiere Pro being a bit slow, but Vegas should hum along just fine on your system. Do you have a lot of extraneous programs installed? E-mail? Antivirus? If at all possible you should avoid surfing the Internet and installing other programs besides your editing programs. Some people manage to get along fine doing all those things on their editing computers, but it's only asking for trouble. And I assume by “512 Crucial Memory 3200 Dual Channel” you mean two sticks of 512MB RAM, since you said earlier you had 1 Gigabyte of RAM. Am I right?

May 4th, 2005, 03:18 PM	#10
Chad Solo Regular Crew Join Date: May 2004 Location: St.Petersburg,Fla Posts: 162	Yes I have 1 -512 and 2-256

May 4th, 2005, 04:50 PM	#11
Christopher Lefchik Trustee Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: US Posts: 1,152	What about the other programs? Do you have other things installed (antivirus, etc,) besides the editing programs? Does it feel slow all the time, or only when editing? If when editing, is it just Premiere Pro, or is it Vegas as well?

May 4th, 2005, 05:03 PM	#12
Chad Solo Regular Crew Join Date: May 2004 Location: St.Petersburg,Fla Posts: 162	Yes I have anti Virus running and the computer just don't feel fast like it should be. I was at my aunts last week and was on her computer and it flew I'm not sure what it was and she wasn't sure what she has but it was very fast. Like adobe Photo on my computer when I go and open up the browser and view my raw files and it's slow I would think it would be allot faster then it is. I made a backup copy of one of my kids DVD last week and used the cce method it took almost 24 hours to render it when most people on this one forum says it should take 4 to 5 hours. I reinstalled everything and made sure much of nothing is starting up when windows reboots. I don't mind upgrading I will hand this CPU motherboard combo to my son and his to my younger son. So they are just waiting lol. chad

May 4th, 2005, 07:41 PM	#13
Christopher Lefchik Trustee Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: US Posts: 1,152	Your motherboard supports up to a 3.2Ghz AMD Athlon XP, so one option would be to upgrade the processor you have and keep your current motherboard (which looks to be a nice one, from what I saw on the Asus site). You could also get a couple sticks of 512MB PC3200 RAM from Crucial to upgrade your RAM to 1.5Gb. AMD Athlon XP 3200+ ($150, OEM): http://www2.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16819103391 Crucial 512MB RAM ($55 each): http://www.crucial.com/store/PartSpe...64Z40B&cat=RAM You could sell your old components on Ebay to help recoup some of the costs. If, on the other hand, you decide to go the route of a both a new processor and motherboard, I would definitely recommend getting something faster than the 3.0Ghz Pentium 4. If you didn't think the bump from your old Athlon 1400 to your Athlon 2800 was much, then you certainly aren't going to be much impressed going to the 3Ghz Pentium 4. Either the AMD or the Intel 64 bit processors would be a good choice. Whichever you choose, as I said earlier I'd recommend at least a 3.6Ghz. If you plan on doing a lot of work with Premiere Pro you might want to lean towards a Pentium 4, since Premiere is optimized for it. That said, many people are happily running Premiere Pro on AMD processors. Your motherboard will depend on whether you choose AMD or Intel. I haven't kept up with motherboards so I'm afraid I can't give you any advice there. I'd recommend looking at the reviews on Extreme Tech (http://www.extremetech.com/category2/0,1556,285,00.asp) and Tom's Hardware (http://www.tomshardware.com/motherboard/index.html). Maybe someone with more knowledge can give some recommendations here. Be aware that the newer motherboards use the new DDR2 RAM. And of course get plenty of RAM, at least a gigabyte or more. I'm still puzzled by the poor performance of your current setup. It seems like it should be running better. Perhaps someone with a similar computer could chime in with their experience/recommendations.

May 4th, 2005, 08:55 PM	#14
Christopher Lefchik Trustee Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: US Posts: 1,152	If you go the route of the new processor/motherboard (basically a new computer) then check out this recent thread we had on the subject of building a new computer: http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=43484. You'll get some good information on the subject.

May 4th, 2005, 11:31 PM	#15
Glenn Chan Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: Toronto, Canada Posts: 4,750	AMD's numbering system: From about 2100+ and below, and AMD xxxx is about equivalent to a Pentium of x.xxx ghz clock speed. Above that, Intel kept getting faster while AMD didn't really catch up. However, Intel came out with a 3.2ghz processor (with hyperthreading and faster front side bus) and AMD responded by releasing a "3200+". Anyways: A- Ghz is an excellent way to compare relate speeds of processors, provided that you are comparing within the same processor line with the same features and everything. Among Intel, you have Celeron, Celeron D, Pentium A, B* (where the top 3.06ghz has HT whereas the rest of the B line does not), C, E, and EE and more versions and now it's the undescriptive numbering system. You can't compare those processors against each other. B- Intel is definitely faster than the Barton AMD processors. At MPEG2 encoding, they have SSE2 (and now SSE3) optimizations which give them quite a boost. One benchmark I saw showed Intel was ~3X faster. AMD64 processors narrow the gap considerably and are in the same ballpark. They support the SSE2 instruction set and the dual cores will support SSE3. At Vegas, Intel and AMD have always run neck to neck at rendertest.veg (intel with a slight lead in most cases). Hyperthreading may slow or improve performance with Vegas 6, so for that particular program it doesn't help. HT does improve MPEG2 encoding times (by 20% or something with the Main Concept encoder DVD architect supposedly uses... I don't know about CCE). C-Norton Antivirus may be slowing down your computer. Try turning real-time scanning off? (You can still have it scan your system every night. And be sure to scan emails.) NAV happens to be one of the slowest-scanning AV programs out there... it may explain why your computer takes a long time to boot and why programs take a little longer to open. It may not explain other behaviour though (i.e. slow rendering speed). D- Are you drives over 85% full? If so, try defragging. E- For dual channel platforms (all Intel, some AMD64, AMD XP is supposedly dual channel with some chipsets but dual channel doesn't actually do anything), optimal memory configuration is pairs of the exact same model + capacity RAM. This may make a small difference in rendering speed (a few percent... on other applications maybe as high as 20%?). If you benchmark your new system against others and there is a small discrepancy, this may be why. http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...id=37831<br /> AMD64 is a different beast than Intel... it may be picky about RAM (i.e. certain RAM just won't work?; haven't been following this stuff close enough) and may not be as sensitive to having an optimal memory configuration as the Intel platform is. F- If you want to use your old RAM, avoid boards/chipsets that only take DDR2 RAM.