HELP! Asus A7M266-D 760 MPX vs Tyan Tiger MP 760?

[gogloss]

I've heard that the 760 MPX chipset is buggy, should I get the Tiger MP board instead of the ASUS MPX board?

I'm not too concerned with 66mhz PCI cards, although I've seen in the benchmarks that the MPX is faster the MP. But, I'm looking for a *stable* platform to run 2 Athlon MP 1600s on - and I want USB that works.

Any thoughts?

Thanks so much,

Laurence

 

[Boonesmi]

where did you hear the mpx is buggy?

 

[BuckleDownBen]

I'd go with the plain MP. MPX only adds the 64 bit/66mHz PCI. There are no bugs with MPX that I know of other than the USB bug. But the motherboard makers will include a USB 2 PCI card if the onboard USB isn't working.

The only other thing the MPX adds is more variety of boards to choose from. So you can mix and match what you want in the way of onboard NIC, onboard sound, and overclocking options.

Since you said you want stability, I'd go with the MP since its been out a while (plus its cheaper)

 

[gogloss]

Our engineer at work had problems with the early boards and certain 3COM NIC cards.

 

[gogloss]

Should I care about the ASUS boards USB 2.0 and AGP pro abilities?

 

[AGodspeed]

<< Our engineer at work had problems with the early boards and certain 3COM NIC cards. >>

I was considering an MPX solution a while back and I did a little research on the supposed 3COM NIC issues. On every message board I visited about this problem, it seems the only solution was to uninstall and then reinstall the drivers for the particular 3COM network card that you had.

The new stepping of MPX doesn't have any USB issues at all though (can't remember which board has this stepping). In fact, some of the earliest MPX boards didn't have any USB issues at all, so there are conflicting rumors....

Btw, I'd get the Tiger MP simply because it's cheaper and is basically no different from the Tiger MPX. Here are some glowing reviews for your reading pleasure:

Anand Lal Shimpi of Anandtech on the Tiger MP

During our weeks of testing we never encountered a single problem with the Tiger MP, even after testing it outside of AMD's and Tyan's specifications by using Dual Athlon (Thunderbird) CPUs and Dual Duron (Morgan) CPUs

Johan De Gelas of Aceshardware on the Tiger MP

As we have been able to test both boards for months now, we can safely say that Tyan's dual Athlon boards are the most stable Athlon platforms on the earth. We have tested the samples that both AMD and Tyan have sent us, and several retail boards (Tyan Tiger MP) for more than three months now, and we have never seen one workstation benchmark fail or crash.