A64 mobos for $80

754-pin Athlon 64 mobos can be had for as little as $80. Based on SiS 755
chipset. This chipset seems to a little pocket rocket, apparently better at
i/o than its rivals. Combine with a $200 A64 3000+, and things are getting
affordable. One of first SIS based mobos is the ECS-755. These SIS chipsets
can allow overclocking of the processor without changing the clock rate of
the PCI or AGP bus; this is similar to Nvidia Nforce 3, but not VIA K8T800.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/mainboa...220083826.html

Yousuf Khan wrote:

754-pin Athlon 64 mobos can be had for as little as $80. Based on SiS 755
chipset. This chipset seems to a little pocket rocket, apparently better
at i/o than its rivals.

I've been very happy with the SIS based AMD systems I've built in the past,
no weird problems etc like I had with many of the Via systems. I'd bet
these work great!
--

Stacey

"stacey" wrote in message
...
Yousuf Khan wrote:

754-pin Athlon 64 mobos can be had for as little as $80. Based on SiS
755
chipset. This chipset seems to a little pocket rocket, apparently better
at i/o than its rivals.

I've been very happy with the SIS based AMD systems I've built in the
past,
no weird problems etc like I had with many of the Via systems. I'd bet
these work great!

Exactly my impression too. VIA sucks!

Yousuf Khan

stacey wrote:
Yousuf Khan wrote:


754-pin Athlon 64 mobos can be had for as little as $80. Based on SiS 755
chipset. This chipset seems to a little pocket rocket, apparently better
at i/o than its rivals.


I've been very happy with the SIS based AMD systems I've built in the past,
no weird problems etc like I had with many of the Via systems. I'd bet
these work great!


I built a MythTV machine using an SIS board, and I'm very impressed with
it. One of the rules of thumb for building such a machine seems to be
"avoid VIA". Timeshifting television seems to put a high load on a
system's PCI / DMA architecture, and VIA boards often cannot cope.

In the early days of the Pentium, SIS boards were a little flakey. But
now, they'd be my top choice.

-WD

"Will Dormann" wrote in message
...
I built a MythTV machine using an SIS board, and I'm very impressed with
it. One of the rules of thumb for building such a machine seems to be
"avoid VIA". Timeshifting television seems to put a high load on a
system's PCI / DMA architecture, and VIA boards often cannot cope.

What's this MythTV thing about?

Yousuf Khan

On Sun, 21 Dec 2003 18:58:41 GMT, Yousuf Khan wrote:

What's this MythTV thing about?

It's Linux based DVR software.

MythTV is bit of a project to set up but the results are IMHO every bit as
good as a TIVO plus there lots of extras such as a music player, movie
player, playback over a network, commercial skipping, manage recordings from
anywhere on the net etc..

http://www.mythtv.org

--
Ray

Yes... I thought that this would be good... and it actually was too good to
be true! Buyers beware!

I did purchase that board couple days ago. Here are my thoughts and
experiences with it:

The retail box did not come with the manual (had to download manual from ecs
web site). Also the driver CD that was supplied with the board was not the
correct one! I had to download the chipset etc. drivers from ecs web site
again...

Second big problem, I do not have an IDE hard disk, but only a SATA disk.
There was no driver floppy disk (needed with windows install) provided.
Also, the ECS nor SIS web sites did not have that driver! I ended up to
search the driver from other manufacturers web sites... and finally found
that from Asrock (ASUS) web site!

OK... at that point I was able to install windows... or so I thought.

During windows2000 install, the computer crashed many times. I had to lower
the speed of my Mushkin PC3500 (216MHz CAS2, 3, 3) ram to 166MHz in the
BIOS. After that I was able to install windows. I also tried another no-name
memory module that runs great with nForce2 board (ABIT NF7-S) at 216MHz
speed with 2,2,2 timings... but no go with the ECS.

Overclocking: The only speed settings that the board booted, were 200, 201,
202 and 203 MHz. I tried almost all the settings all the way to 232 (max. in
the BIOS), but no go. Somewhere around 220 I corrupted the BIOS... and had
to restore that from the bootable floppy. (That is a big plus with that
board that corrupted bios can be restored with bootable floppy disk!)

In the ECS web sites there are links to some newer (revA and revC) BIOSes...
but the actual files have been pulled out. I did find the same bioses
somewhere else, and did try them. They added the cool'n'quiet support, and
also "improve DRAM capability"... the improvement was that the bios disabled
DDR400 (PC3200) setting!!! I ended up to put back the original BIOS.

Finally I get so frustrated that I did go to Fry's and bought the MSI K8T
NEO board... and what a difference! The windows install did go through as
smooth as it could. Also right now I'm running the board at 220MHz FSB and
the memory is running at its rated settings. (Of course the clock speed is
slightly higher than rated...but still runs good!) Everything works very
good!

Tomorrow I'm going to RMA the ECS board back to the vendor. The price was
cheap, about half of the MSI board, but even if the ECS board was free I do
not think I'd use it...

Only consider to use that board if you do not plan to overclock and if you
plan to use PC2700 memory or slower with it... At least until they release a
new BIOS that fixes the problems.



"Yousuf Khan" wrote in
message
.cable.rogers.com...
754-pin Athlon 64 mobos can be had for as little as $80. Based on SiS 755
chipset. This chipset seems to a little pocket rocket, apparently better
at
i/o than its rivals. Combine with a $200 A64 3000+, and things are getting
affordable. One of first SIS based mobos is the ECS-755. These SIS
chipsets
can allow overclocking of the processor without changing the clock rate of
the PCI or AGP bus; this is similar to Nvidia Nforce 3, but not VIA
K8T800.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/mainboa...220083826.html

On a sunny day (21 Dec 2003 20:04:22 GMT) it happened Ray
wrote in :

On Sun, 21 Dec 2003 18:58:41 GMT, Yousuf Khan wrote:

What's this MythTV thing about?

It's Linux based DVR software.

MythTV is bit of a project to set up but the results are IMHO every bit as
good as a TIVO plus there lots of extras such as a music player, movie
player, playback over a network, commercial skipping, manage recordings from
anywhere on the net etc..

http://www.mythtv.org

--
Ray

may interest you to know I do all that on VIA, need no myth, see
http://www.home.zonnet.nl/panteltje/dvd/
I stream with dvbstream ethernet
I record 4 TV programs at the same time, and time shift watch
old recordings too.
The harddisk light gets a bit busy if more then 4 DTV stuff is happening.
Do the math.
Linux of cause.

"KMS" wrote in message
news:cxnFb.12507$VB2.22294@attbi_s51...
Yes... I thought that this would be good... and it actually was too good
to
be true! Buyers beware!

I did purchase that board couple days ago. Here are my thoughts and
experiences with it:

Well, looks like you had a "learning experience" with it.

Yousuf Khan

On Sun, 21 Dec 2003 22:41:50 GMT, Jan Panteltje wrote:
may interest you to know I do all that on VIA, need no myth, see
http://www.home.zonnet.nl/panteltje/dvd/

I envy you having programming broadcast in dvb. I'm stuck having my dss
receiver decode the mpeg2 stream to ntsc and then having my pc re-encode it again
.... what a waste and fairly impractical for more than a couple of streams at
a time.

I stream with dvbstream ethernet
I record 4 TV programs at the same time, and time shift watch
old recordings too.

The nice thing about Myth is that all those features are nicely integrated
and wrapped up in a nice wife friendly gui complete with program guide.
Just push a few buttons on the remote and you've just told it to record "24"
or whatever whenever it plays and Myth's even smart enough NOT to bother
recording the re-runs.

--
Ray