Need help choosing a mobo

[NotEvilSven]

I'm new to the mysterious world of motherboards and hope that someone can help me with choosing one.

I have made a list of things that I want/don't want to see on my new board.

- need a motherboard for 1,2 Ghz Athlon Thunderbird
- I'm not going to overclock it
- the board has to be very stable
- no onboard sound, graphics, network or other cards please!
- AGP 4x
- need only PCI slots (besides AGP) and as many of them as possible
(4 at least)

Thanks for everybody who can help!

 

[Zeppy]

For Athlon or Duron you really only have two choices as far as most are concerned. Either the Abit Kt7 or the MSI K7tPro2A. The Abit has 5 (I think) PCI, 1 ISA, and 4x AGP. The MSI is 6 PCI, no ISA and 4x AGP. It does however have onboard sound, but that's easily disabled via the BIOS. Take a look at the reviews on Anandtech and you will see that ABIT and MSI are definetly tops.

 

[gittyup]

MSI K7T Pro2A. Stability.

monarch has these boards for $118 plus shipping.

 

[NotEvilSven]

But what about Asus k7v?

 

[Mem]

NotEvilSven,buy the MSI K7T Pro2-A you can disable the onboard sound in Bios which is very easy to do, you can then use your own soundcard ,also it`s best board for stability etc.

 

[PCComp]

The Asus A7V has some problems. Purchase either the KT7 or the K7T Pro 2A...

 

[CraigRT]

If you can get an A7V tuned up properly it's very stable, my friend has one with a 1 GHz T-Bird in it and it runs mint all day long... he has 384 MB Micron PC133, a Voodoo 5 5500 and an SBLive X-Gamer and a few other things.. no probs with anything!

 

[HighRisk]

If your patient the abit kt7a and kt7a-raids should be coming out as well as the msi k7t-turbo both based off the via kt133a chipset and from what I've read will give a 8-10% performance boost. There has been a delay on them due to some information that amd did not get to mb makers in time, so it's hard to say how long before they will be out. It sounded like they would have been out this month if not for the delay.