I have a friend shopping for a new motherboard. I have been out of the motherboard market for quite some time and would like some help in steering him in the right direction. He's looking at a Gigabyte KT600, and any other boards with similar features. Any body need to slam this board? any praise? Any suggestions?

So I'm guessing he's looking at AMD. I'd still recommend the board I have (and have put in three other machines for others), the ASUS A7N8X Deluxe. It's worked great for me.

I guess the only thing I'd ask is what is he looking for? Anything specific?

www.tomshardware.com

LOTS of reviews.

I personally like Gigabyte, I've got the 400 Pro2 v2 with SATA RAID. I love it.

He has always stayed with AMD. FOr some reason i have too. I chose AMD years ago and just have never seen any benifits of the Intel chips. Of course the last time I looked at specs on chips I was in high school.
As far as features, most come with USB 2.0 and he's really going to like the 4 fold increase in front side bus speed.
All he really wants is a board that is bulletproof. And i want him to have it. Otherwise i am stuck fixing the little screwups.

Well, can't speak for Gigabyte boards, but ever since I got my ASUS I've never had a problem. I started with a Soyo Dragon, and that was a nightmare.

I now have all my USB2 ports connected, firewire via back panel expansion slot, 3 hard disks and DVD+RW drive running on IDE, and one hard disk on SATA. I've never had a problem that was a result of the motherboard its self.

Oh god, I'm really out of touch. What is SATA?

I have been so wrapped up with school and stupid women that haven't been able to keep up with everything in the tech world. I used to be really knowledgeable about this sort of thing

Serial ATA. It's a new hard drive connection technology. You can only have one drive per cable and the cables are much smaller. The intent is that it'll be faster than the old (parallel) ATA, but in practice, that doesn't seem to be the case yet. (Though it might now, I haven't really been paying attention for a few months.)

I know you said you like AMD, but Intel is making consumer-level motherboards now that are extremely competitive price- and feature-wise. I can't imagine anything more stable than an Intel processor on an Intel motherboard using an Intel chipset. You might want to check them out.

I can't imagine anything more stable than an Intel processor on an Intel motherboard using an Intel chipset. You might want to check them out.

I'll do that. Thanks for the information

Any particular Intel board you recommend? there seems to be quite a few out there.

I have a D865-PERL-L that seems to work pretty well.

there's a good deal of info at http://www.anandtech.com too.
checkout the 'chipset' tab at the top.

Can anyone comment on one of the 64bit processors?

Intel is making consumer-level motherboards now that are extremely competitive price- and feature-wise

I wasn't under the impression that it was the motherboards that were the price factor, but the processors. Looking at Pricewatch, the Athlon 3200 is $194 and the P4 3.2GHz is $274. It follows pretty much all the way down.

Storage Review.com has done tests on all the WD SATA disks, and while they aren't as fast as they are advertised (they're advertised as SCSI server disk replacements), they've come closer to those speeds than their PATA counterparts. So they do appear to be faster.

Well, it used to be that Intel sold rock-solid motherboards that had basically no features and sold for ten times the price of any other motherboard. In those days, it was about the motherboard price. Now it's not and can be about the CPU price again. But when I bought mine, there was very little difference in price between the two CPU manufacturers. I'm inclined to go more for stability anyway, and my experiences with non-Intel chipsets has been less than stellar.

I don't see the point yet since you need all new software to take advantage of it and there is almost none at this time.

you need all new software to take advantage of it

That is what i have heard, but not confirmed.

Not to be argumentative, although I am taking an opposite stance as my experience differs:

I have never had a stable Intel board/chipset - ever!
All the AMD boards I have had have been stable (thats 18 or 19 now)

What's more, AMD seem to make boards which fit well, have well designed spacer holes and solid connectors.

Just my two bob

I happen to agree with you, but it's amazing how different opinions can be. I firmly believe that if you looked at the big picture, at all the Intel systems and all the AMD systems, you'd probably conclude that it doesn't really matter. But when I'm looking at a system, for some reason I choose AMD. It just seems to suit me better.

That's just the way I see it, I guess. This seems to happen quite often with computer hardware. Every time someone asks for a recommendation on which hard drive to get, we get one person saying they've had 8 Western Digital drives go bad on them, then another who swears by them after going 10 years without a faulty drive.

Maybe stability isn't the right word. I've always had insoluble trouble with non-Intel chipset boards, but never show-stopper problems. Usually stuff like DMA won't work properly. That's been the most common one of recent years. (And, yes, I've installed the chipset drivers. I've followed the motherboard's instructions, the chipset's instructions, internet folks' instructions, different driver versions, every permutation I can think of, including not installing them at all, and still not get it to work right. Intel chipsets need no third-party drivers and seem to work fine without arguing about it.) I don't really enjoy or have the time to argue with my computer, at least on a hardware level.

I've always used Intel processors (no good reason - just inertia) and have had a series of non-intel chipset motherboards. Installs on these machines almost always yeilded some problem (ranging from 3in1 VIA driver issues to memory capacity (1GB usable at 100Mhz, 756MB allowed at 133Mhz FSB - undocumented) to misc. lockups while gaming with another MOBO - not heat related).

I recently upgraded my Mobo/Processor & RAM without reinstalling the OS. I used an Intel 865-PERL-K and did not have a single problem. Every other Mobo install required an OS reinstall (windows 95, 98, 2k) and this one did not.

So, while I can't comment on the AMD side, if you go Intel for the processor, my vote is for an Intel chipset to match.

-Zeke

I remember the reason I initially chose AMD. When I started building computers (back in 98) the AMD K7 was spanking the P2 in a very singnifigant way. The level 2 cache was bigger, and serveral other performance issues led the K2 to out preform the P2.