Based on GuildBoss's requirements, AMD and Intel are equally recommendable. So it boils down to personal preference - AMD or Intel. Maybe you could help him by recommending a good Intel board. It's a tough decision.:confused: I'm leaning towards the AMD choice because Epox 8RDA+ at $98 (MWave)...
The AMD retail heatsink is indeed not as good as intel's but one could get a cooler master HAC-V81 heatsink+Fan for as little as $12 - great for overclocking.
And if he enjoys quality audio in games, he'll probably have to get a sound card for the intel setup.
Depending on the BIOS and such, some nforce2 boards have problems booting with PC3500 memory and Corsair "Low Latency" memory out-of-box. I would choose the XMS PC3200 CAS2.
- Make sure there's no metal-to-metal contact between the bottom of the motherboard and the metal of the case.
- Double-check for proper heatsink installation.
- If ya get two 256MB sticks now and upgrade to 1GB in the future by buying a 512MB stick, you'll still have 1GB in dual ddr. No reason to sacrafice dual ddr now or in the future.
- For the cpu fan, check what others are using.
In short, they were looking for something to knock them off of their chairs in terms of overclocking and they recieved results that came up short of that. Great results nonetheless. :) And they were not using the latest BIOS (1.6). To really see what the board can do, a *true* overclocker would...
Nforce2 boards from other manus, besides abit, are subject to BIOS corruption also. Whichever board ya use, DO NOT POWER OFF while the BIOS is saving your settings! NF7-S Rev 1.2 displays a message with respect to this when you save your bios settings.
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