by jeffmd » Jun 13, 2002 @ 11:40pm
ok village... lets see if we cant hook you up with a better mobo. That pc chips one looks way to cheapo..
heres what I managed to find... over at bzboyz.com they have a combo of a Shuttle ak32L with an xp2000 for $208. ups ground shipping is $15 which is about $5 more then standered.. not to bad (all the shipping prices seem $5 inflated).
The shuttle has alot of high end boards out there and this one looks pretty impressive, sporting the VIA266 chipset, 2 built in usb and 4 extension usb ports (Im not sure if the included extender has 2 or 4 usb ports), built in audio, and a built in Ethernet RJ45 port. It also has 6 pci slots, and get this, 2 banks for DDR ram and 2 banks for SDRAM. I dont think you can combine them (havnt read anything about it), I would imagin the difference in speeds between them would cause all hell to break lose. The motherboard also sports hardware monitoring and apparently even has built in speed fan controls. Lastly this board has been out for a while.. and the "L" actually means version 2.0, so the board has had atleast one revision to fix any bugs that have come up.
heres a very good thread I found on the board, one post has links for 3 or 4 reviews. (BTW some of these are for revision 1.. )
direct link to one review is
looking at bzboyz site, it looks very well put together and looks to be a good bet to order from. when ordering, they give you the option to upgrade many options.. they offer a 512meg stick of ddr ram for $77 there as well so you might as well get your ram from them too, because THEN what you can do is opt for their TEST plans, and they can test the mobo with the cpu and ram before shipping. as for everything else there.. I wouldnt bother.
you can find the combo at near the bottem of the page.
next on your list of course is a good heatsink. My personal fav are the millenium glaciator 2. . It wieghs a ton but offers great cooling preformance while maintaining low noise. The normal MG2 cost $29, and they apparently have a new one out for $35 that has an even quieter fan. how ever you may not need the quieter one with the speed fan controls on your mobo. They have a Glite version (aluminum) that is $21, but honestly, your working with a 2000xp here, cheap cooling solutions are on the no-no list.
one last thing, artic silver apparently no longer comes standered with the MG2 :/ so youll need to buy the $6 tube of AS3 that they have on the MG2 site, but its comparitivly better then the tube of AS3 BZBOYZ sells on their site for $9. :D
), so get a good soundcard like the Sound Blaster Audigy.
