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On 16-Jan-2002 at 11:00:11 Chris Edwards wrote:
does anyone have any recommendations or recent experience of buying a budget motherboard for AMD (Duron most likely, for an all new box but keeping the old monitor, mouse etc). Hoping to keep the overall cost down to about #300. Currently I am tending towards a Gigabyte GA-71XE as it has lots of PCI slots and 1 ISA and costs about #50 inc VAT.
I have a gigabyte board with my duron 700. Not sure of the model (its at home; 7ZX I think), but I got it a couple of years ago. I have had no problems with it at all, but I did buy a second cpu fan since the duron gives off a fair bit of heat - probably nothing compared to the gigahertz ones nowadays! However, I used to read the gigabyte newsgroup as well, and quite a few people did have problems and got little support. The UK gigabyte site was horrendous and well out of date. However, someone picked up on this and seemdd to be pulling it all back together again - updated the site, replied to users problems, etc, etc. In that respect support from gigabyte may be much better now. Will add that I've had no problems with the on-board sound card (ensoniq 1371 ?) either.
I have no previous experience putting a box together, but have checked out various sites for linux compatibility.
I have built all my PC's from bits since I started home computing. Personally I like to pick out the bits I want and glue them together rather than buying a pre-built box. It may/may not cost more, but I get what I want. Needless to say if I break something then it's my fault and I have to sort it out. Worst case was buying a motherboard which arrived with no cache memory. Took me a while to work out why the thing was dead as a dodo!! :-) John. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ John Horne, University of Plymouth, UK Tel: +44 (0)1752 233914 E-mail: jhorne@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx PGP key available from public key servers -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.