Trying to Find the Easiest Way Out

October 24, 2005 12:43 PM

MotherboardFilter: Looking for anecdotal experience on an inexpensive replacement for my motherboard that has a PCIx for a new video card.

I currently run with an ASUS P4PE-X. I would like to upgrade my video card, but the current crop of video cards out there are way more powerful than my AGP 4x video port will support. By buying one of those newer cards in an AGP version, I feel like I'd be throwing away my money, as the performance wouldn't gain through the bottle-neck of the interface.

I'm looking for a good brand that is going to allow me the least amount of residual upgrades to my system. If I have to, I'll upgrade my memory, CPU, PSU, and Hard Drives -- but I"d rather not. The only really thing I need to change is moving from AGP to PCIx.

I'm most interested in your anecdotal experience. What particular brand and model have been working for you? Are you dissatisfied with it?

Finally, bonus questions: One of the boards at which I've been looking has a 1GB Ethernet card. I could buy a router that's rated that high, and put a card like that on my son's machine. This would certainly reduce time from machine to machine. My quandary there is having to wire the house up for Ethernet whereas it has been (to date) all wireless. Is moving to 1GB (and then having to wire my home to take advantage of it) worth it? Will I see any sort of benefit in communications with my otherwise normal Ethernet connection with my cable modem, or is that just attaching an elephant to a mouse?

posted by thanotopsis to computers & internet (7 comments total)

1. I recently built a new from-scratch computer with the EPoX EP-9NPA+ Ultra motherboard. I love it a lot so far. Easy installation, great POST diagnostics (LEDs on the motherboard), comes with SATA and rounded PATA cables. It has "Magic Bios" which is an easy-to-use utility that checks for BIOS updates and then performs flashing from within Windows. It's been rated very highly for performance, both out of the box and overclocked. I realize that you're looking for an Intel motherboard (and mine is nForce4 Ultra for AMD), but I do suggest you check out the EPoX offerings.

A new motherboard with the same CPU shouldn't necessitate any other upgrades.

2. Elephant to a mouse.
posted by rxrfrx at 1:23 PM on October 24, 2005

I think you mean PCIe/PCI-E/PCI Express, since PCI-X is a set of extensions to the "old" PCI standard.
posted by kcm at 1:31 PM on October 24, 2005

I don't know the circumstances, but wiring your house with Cat6 will probably be expensive, not to mention a ginormous pain in the arse. Have you thought about using a repeater to boost your wireless? Are you using 802.11g? None of it is that blazing, but if you have the same equipment in each machine (name brand like linksys or what have you) you should get the "fastest" wireless connection.
posted by AllesKlar at 2:18 PM on October 24, 2005

AGP4x isn't really a bottleneck. 3D graphics are command-driven... the CPU streams a sequence of instructions and textures to the GPU, and the card renders everything from local memory. If you hook up a powerful 3D card via standard old PCI (and yes, you can still find these cards), you can barely tell the difference. Load times are a bit slower, because it takes one or two extra seconds to load the card with textures, but the performance is nearly identical in most games.

AGP was largely invented to speed up 2D graphics, which of course were largely obsoleted shortly thereafter. For 3D, the big selling point of AGP is to let the video card stream in textures from main RAM, but even the 8x flavor isn't fast enough for that. The local card RAM is wildly faster than the (relatively) glacial AGP bus. So everyone writes programs to fit in the texture memory on the card itself, rather than trying to stream from main memory. There are a few exceptions, but very few.

PCI-e probably will be fast enough to do this memory streaming, and it'll let you do other cool stuff like SLI (teaming up a pair of video cards for more performance), but it's not really necessary yet for the current generation of video cards.

If you're happy with your current CPU speed and amount of RAM, I'd suggest just buying a solid midrange card to tide you over until you're ready to upgrade everything at once. You will get nearly nothing from the actual PCI-E upgrade right now, other than much better future-proofing.

Bonus question short answer:

1) If you're on 802.11b, upgrade to 11g or to wired Fast Ethernet. (and make sure to use WPA2 on your G connection, the old WEP is nearly useless now.)
2) If you're on 11g now, upgrade to Fast Ethernet only if you feel constrained by the (relatively) slow file copies between machines.
3) Don't bother with gigabit yet unless you KNOW you need it.

Bonus question long answer:

Are you unhappy with the speed of your network now? If you're running 802.11g, the "54 megabit" wireless (which is really about 20 megabits in real life), it's enough for most uses. Email, web browsing, gaming, and light file sharing between local computers will all run just fine. If you're still back on 802.11b, which is about 4 megabits in real life, that's slow enough to become a bit annoying... it's still fast enough for basic uses, but if you want to copy a big file over the wireless, it will take a long time, and 2 or 3 wireless clients can easily choke the network.

A basic Fast Ethernet network will give you a substantial speed boost for very little money, particularly if you're coming from 802.11b. That's 100 megabits, and as long as you buy a switch (not a hub), you'll get a total of 200 megabits per port... 100 up and 100 down, simultaneously. This is really very fast, and more than enough for almost anyone. The only reason to go faster is if you're in a very heavy filesharing situation, where you're moving around gigs of files routinely. And you also can't use the full speed potential of gigabit ethernet over the PCI bus, so putting a gigabit card in your son's computer will only take his machine up to about 300 megabits or so. Only PCI-e and (most)motherboard gigabit cards will actually be able to use a whole gigabit. So until both your machines have the faster cards on a modern bus, the extra expense probably isn't worth it.
posted by Malor at 3:38 PM on October 24, 2005

Do NOT get an MSI board. I wanted an Athlon 64 (Socket 939) board with PCI-E. The MSI board was one of two options on the market at the time. It has been a piece of shit. The USB ports all but don't work, the manual shows a completely different BIOS than the one on the board (and yes, I flashed the BIOS), and the fan over the northbridge chipset bit the dust within the first 2 days. All of this is SOP, apparently.

On the plus side, the OC options are amazing.

For the bonus question.. I have a couple computers on a home network with 100Mbit cabling. I can stream DVDs from one computer to another without any lag. I don't mind spending a bit more time to copy files.
posted by devilsbrigade at 4:16 PM on October 24, 2005

Piggyback: was the Asus A8V-E SE I ordered yesterday a good idea? I have had mixed experiences with their boards in the past, but I thought I'd take the plunge again. Did I make a mistake?
posted by PinkStainlessTail at 6:23 PM on October 24, 2005

Pink, by and large, I've had very good luck with ASUS boards. They're not quite as good as they once were, but are still generally considered an excellent choice. For future reference, DFI has lately gotten quite good, and Tyan has always been considered a Tier-1 manufacturer.

Were it me, I'd probably have gone for an nVidia chipset instead. Historically, the Via chipsets have had niggling little problems... nearly always fixed with driver updates, but that has sometimes taken awhile. They're still good, however, and chances are excellent that you'll be very happy with it.

I don't have any experience with that particular board model, but assuming there are no specific problems with it, you should be fine.

Before buying hardware, I try to always pop by Ars Technica and peruse their various forums. They have some of the most knowledgeable enthusiasts on the 'Net. In this case, you'd want to read "CPU and Motherboard Technologia."
posted by Malor at 12:55 AM on October 25, 2005