Need guiding selecting mobo...

[Nimbus1951]

I've seen some other posts about selecting a mobo and a 939 system, but they seem to differ from me regarding use and choise of processor.

First of all the use...: I'm not going to OC. So if a mobo is good for OC doesn't matter for me.
Second I've already settled for the AMD 64 3500+... not any higher and not a 51... ;)

Anyway there's 3 mobos available here Denmark and I'm not sure which one to go with:

1) ABIT AV8
2) ASUS A8V Deluxe WiFi-G
3) Gigabyte GA-K8NSNXP-939

I personally like the Gigabyte because of the chipset. However it says 1600MHZ at the Gigabyte and 2000MHz at the two others... I don't know what that refers to (regarding 64bit systems I'm somewhat a n00b).

Help out a n00b and tell me which one to go with :)

Regards,
Nimbus

[edit] oh one more thing.... 350W or 400W PSU for 3HDDs, one CD-r, radeon9800Pro?

[LilGator]

HyperTransport is higher on the VIA chipsets than on the nVidia chipsets?

Really, I don't know of anyone having problems not overclocking any of those boards :D

[Nimbus1951]

Oh so it is Hypertransport!? It must be a typo then!?!

Anyway... so if I'm not OC'ing it doesn't matter which card I choose? But there's a price difference from the cheapest to the most expensive of almost 100$!
As far as I know the nForce3 U chipset is faster in some areas (not all but some, same speed in the rest)... can you confirm that?

Regards,
Nimbus

[r3b0rN]

i remember hearing the via chipset was faster clock for clock alot of the time than the nf3 150 chipset, dont know if the 250's performance has improved...

id go the gigabyte, although im betting thats the most expensive?

[Nimbus1951]

Well... I actually proved myself wrong. I went through the tomshardware.com tests and found out that the Via K8T800 Pro (on the asus board) was actually slightly faster.

And yes - the Gigabyte is almost 100$ more expensive than the asus board.

So unless there's some really hard facts against the asus board this is the card I feel suits me...

Oh and one more thing... I though I knew what dual channel DDR was but I aparantly don't. I thought that dual channel meant that I could use two 512MB sticks together acting as one (so I had 512MB and not 1GB) with improved performance... but a friend of mine says it's not so....?!
The what is dual channel exactly???

Regards,
Nimbus

[Levish]

dual channel meaning there is 2x the bandwidth when accessing each stick

you will still have 2x 512 but also 2x the bandwidth of a non dual channel chipset