Is This Motherboard A Good Deal?

[Fierce Critter]

From a posting on one of my Yahoo buy/sell/trade groups:

AzRock

K-7VMZ

Socket A

TWO DDR SLOTS

TWO SDRAM SLOTS

HEAT SYNC AND FAN INCLUDED

HAS AGP

4 ONBOARD USB

5.1 STEREO SOUND

ONBOARD VIDEO

3 PCI SLOTS

TWO IDE

FLOPPY CONTROLLER

220$ board, bought brand new.. about 5/6 months old; asking 40$ to get

it out of the house, no use for it anymore.

Jon and I have been Frankensteining our eMachines ready-built with improvements like a Lightscribe DVD/CD burner, both internal and external Linksys wireless adapter/receiver, we just FINALLY bumped me up from 512mb ram to 1.5GB, and a decently new GEforce video card.

We picked up a nice case with lots of power supply/fan geegaws on it just waiting to be fleshed out into a homemade system.

We're wondering if this motherboard would be a good buy in the direction of eventually picking up a processor and whatever else we'd need on top of what we've already got to make a really good, fast gaming/graphics PC.

If not, we'll probably stick with either buying a ready-made but exceptionally GOOD PC next year, or buy the rest of the parts we'd need to build from what we've already got later.

Whatcha think? I'm not good with hardware.

[Gaf The Horse With Tears]

NO

Stay away from Asrock. They were originally a spin off company of Asus. Asus wanted to be able to deliver a lower priced solution to the public. Asrock was born. After about a year, Asus sued Asrock to force them to stop telling people they were associated in anyway due to the fact that Asrock has horrid failure rates and dismall performace.

[Gaf The Horse With Tears]

Also, there is no damn way that was a $220 board new. Maybe $150... but I doubt it.

[Gaf The Horse With Tears]

I did some checking... the store I used to manage... retailed that board brandnew for $90.

[Scales]

Last I heard E-Machines have a tendency to have the parts they come with die. When Gateway closed all their physical location stores and merged with E-Machines that was as far as I know, the end of them making nice, sometimes slightly overpriced p.c.'s.

If you plan on building something in the future, I recommend going to www.newegg.com and reading reviews on all the parts you buy too, cons can be helpful.

As for gaming, it's a sad reality that any games originally made for Xbox/Microsoft like Halo 2 and Gears of War, are only available to be played on Vista. Vista = Sh*thole Bad. If you get a 64 bit processor look for the 64 bit Xp Pro OS. Of course with older games that run on 32 bit you can't really emulate them too well on 64 bit from what I know, so what you want to build all depends on what kind of games your planning on playing.

As for prebuilt, Dell is alright (hard to understand foreign customer service), I'm sure there are other one's out there. The mag P.C. Gamer sells some nice prebuilt gamer p.c.'s. I wouldn't recommend getting a pre-built one from a repair shop, there are some good people out there, but it's easy to get f***ed over by those places; having an apprenticeship at one of those places years ago is partly why own an A+ book now.

[Scary Guy]

My advice is go with an open architecture case and board (most other components are already open architecture).

E-machines are a joke (as a computer and as a company). Me and all of my übernerd friends make fun of them (and gateway, HP/compaq, etc...) on a constant basis with such great lines as "I wouldn't even buy one for my grandmother" and "I'd rather use a toaster".

My advice is to save up for a GOOD system and avoid using stepping stones to get there. Get something with 64bit capabilities (or at the very least quad/dual core, preferably both). AGP is on its way out and is being replaced by PCI/E (or PCIx or whatever the new spec is, I haven't gone shopping lately). These days pretty much EVERYTHING is built into the motherboard also which is alright, but only if they give you enough expansion slots for other devices. PATA (more commonly referred to as EIDE) is going away too in favor of SATA which increases bus speed on the drives and beats out older SCSI specifications (although it is still limited by how fast the disk spins). Pricewatch and (as scales said) newegg are your friends here and to a degree e-bay too (though I don't trust it).

Finally I'll say that ASUS isn't even that great as far as boards go.

EDIT:

Also stay away from ANYTHING with TPM listed as a "feature"

[Fierce Critter]

I wasn't exactly looking for a critique on the eMachines, I already know it's a brand I wouldn't go with again. Our first PC was a 1999 model HP Pavilion. We kept that until 2005 and that little mutherfucker never gave us a single problem period. Matter of fact, EVERY HP product we've ever had - and that's a decent number - impressed us.

We went with the eMachine because, at the time, we were living in NC and had a TigerDirect store right near us. We were going to go with a store-built machine, but this refurbished T2858 was a very, very good deal for the money.

But we're having a lot of problems with it. The USB drives are constantly going out. The fan system is lackluster and recently I've been having a lot of crashes, we believe probably due to overheating. Once we got a can of forced air out and blasted the internals, things got better. And the cases are too small. I had to choose between adding a video card or having an internal Linsys because the way the slots are arranged, once the monitor was plugged into the video card, there was no room to position the antenna. Ended up getting an external adapter to solve the problem.

We'll be making it a priority after the start of the year to get me a new PC. I would definitely welcome input once the time has come, but I'll make a new thread for that. And if any more individual parts become available, I'll ask for you smarties to give me this kind of input again.

As for gaming, pretty much that means Second Life. I don't buy PC games that I can play on Playstation. I just prefer it that way. Adding that gig of ram has really helped - to a point. I'm not real versed on this stuff, but I think I'm partly having problems with slowness due to processor speed.

I also frequently have to have Second Life, AOL and Photoshop CS2 running at the same time when I'm working on something for my avatar. I need something that won't buckle under the strain.

[Gaf The Horse With Tears]

Actually.

E-machines are nice computers for your avarage home user. Unfortuantly, like many other companys, they have fallen victom to the capacitor catastrophy of a few years ago. Specifically though, it's thier power supplys. E-Machines built between 2003 and 2005 have a very high chance of having a power supply built with faulty capacitors. When said capacitors finally give it up, there is a high chance they will dump everything they are holding directly into the motherboard. This will usually destroy the motherboard.

Gateway, Dell, MSI, PC-Chips, and Deer Power Supplys all got hit pretty hard buy it in variuos ways.

BTW... XP Pro and Home are fine with either a 32 or 64 bit cpu. Games don't have to be ported to run 64bit just because you have a 64bit cpu. XP Pro 64bit is the one that people are having problems porting the games too but almost no one went to the 64bit XP.

Vitsa is having problems with games for various reasons under the 32bit and 64bit versions. That stems for a coupel causes. The hardware drivers are not being mature yet being the biggest problem. DirectX 10 has a few bugs being number two. That will get better with time. It's not a big deal. XP had problems at first too with games. SP1, SP2 and DirectX 9 fixed those.

and FC... I can build you a basic gaming rig with the ability to expand it into something rather nice for under $700. Thats would be the pc only... a monitor, KB and mouse are extra. You just have to be my hands.

[Scary Guy]

I also frequently have to have Second Life, AOL and Photoshop CS2 running at the same time when I'm working on something for my avatar. I need something that won't buckle under the strain.

You definitely want a multi core/chip computer then. I've got my old gigabyte GA6BXD sitting behind me that has dual P3 450 MHz chips in it. It ran windows 2000/XP fine when it came out and better than some GHz machines of the day. Also XP home has capabilities for dual core I think (put in to take advantage of the hyperthreading capabilities of the P4 chips).

[Gaf The Horse With Tears]

XP Home supports up to 2 CPUs or two cores because it is based off the same NT core as XP Pro, Win2k, NT 4 and NT 3.51. It actually supports 16 but is only licensed for 2.

[Head Wreck]

just got rid of vista 64 bit ultimate for plain old winXP pro.

all software niggles solved

[Scary Guy]

XP Home supports up to 2 CPUs or two cores because it is based off the same NT core as XP Pro, Win2k, NT 4 and NT 3.51. It actually supports 16 but is only licensed for 2.

Not originally, but now it does. They bumped up the license to two because like I said there was the whole hyperthreading issue and everyone was complaining that they couldn't take advantage of it.

Actually XP home doesn't even allow for two processors

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/810231

[Fierce Critter]

New thread coming...