MSI Neo2-LS or Abit IS7

[deftno9]

Hey y'all, I'm lookin to get a nice, cheap springdale board and I've narrowed my search to these two boards. Both have practiclly the same price and the same features I'm looking for. I've had my eye on the MSI board, mainly cause of the cool NB fan, but I've been hearing some bad stuff about its bios, corecell tech and memory compatibility. So i've come across the IS7, basicly now I'm trying to find all the dirt I can about this board to make a final decision. My system will consist of a P42.4c and Corsair TWINX XMS DDR466 516mb RAM.

[Hippy]

Cheap boards? Prices range from £75-£125 with next to no difference between the top ones. As to performance i wouldn't know but two names i do know are good AND recamended by lots of peoples are:

ABIT IS7
-or-
ASUS P4P800

Both retail at about £90-£100 and come with loads of features.

Here has a good list of Springdale boards:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/

Type 'springdale' into the serch engine to get the 8 results. Check the 'i' button for info' and then use google or some such to get a few reviews on these.

Hope this helps a little :)

[Hippy]

Forgot to add that with the hardware your getting in your system i think you should get as good a mobo as you can afford to make best use of it.
Dont go saving money on an important and potentialy long lasting componant.

[deftno9]

true, but both boards are just stripped down versions of high qual boards. like no SATA, firewire, gigabit lan. I really have no need for them as I only have PATA HD's, no digital cameras and no need fo gigabit lan cause my school is cheap. so I'm saving quite a bit of money on features I wont use for a while, atleast til the time to my next upgrade. P4P800 def has my attention along wit Abit and MSI. all are top in the biz so its a tough call. think in the end I'll be happy wit whichever1 i get unless some1 had ne bad experieces and would like to share. Thnsk

[Rich]

The problems I have seen are on boards made by MSI, although most of these problems are actually stemming from the Gigabit LAN controller. I would avoid gigabit lan on a mobo if at all possible. The guy who had the board basically had to disable the glan in the BIOS and buy a network card. He has also used many different boards by MSI and loves them. Since the ones you are looking at don't have the g-lan, you should be ok.

[deftno9]

yea got my MSI Neo2-LS a couple weeks ago and its been working like a charm. The only prob is it doesnt seem to like working in ultra-turbo mode which i guess is an accelerated version of PAT since turbo is PAT. Heard they;re some compat issues wit Corsair so hopefully they'll iron this out in the next bios. I highy recommend this board for ne1 on a tight budget or some1 who doesnt need alll the extra poop.

[ELiTE KiLLaH]

i would have gone for asus or abit
inmy experiences with msi, all have been crap
either something didnt work, or...well thats about it...something didnt work, or work properly

i just b uilt my friend a computer with a gigabyte mobo
seems to be doing quite well
it was a really cheap canterwood chipset
i think 8IK1100 or something..

[deftno9]

hmm, it appears that im having trouble playing games now. I've just upgraded to XP and now when I play games like CnC, or the new homeworld2 demo the games quit out to desktop. I'm thinking this has something to do with my motherboard/memory compatability or DX 9 which has fudged up my gaming before. I've updated everything and still nada.

[ELiTE KiLLaH]

what os?
if 2k/xp, go start>run>eventvwr and see if theres any errors which pertain to the problem (around the same time...or whatver)

also, take off the side of ur case ...if it still happens, take a housefan and face it so it blows into ur tower (with the side of it still off..)

if this fixes the problem, chances are the vid card is just overheating

[A Person]

Forgot to add that with the hardware your getting in your system i think you should get as good a mobo as you can afford to make best use of it.
Dont go saving money on an important and potentialy long lasting componant.

I agree. Buy the best mobo you can. It's easy to replace other parts later but if your mobo can't support them then you're out of luck. It's always funny when I am helping someone with their comp and I tell them to get bigger badder memory. But then I open it up and go, "oh wait, your mobo sucks balls, you'll need to put down an extra 90 bucks for a newer one" Go all out on the mobo.