Apex

I will never buy another Asus for as long as I am alive. My A7N8X-E Deluxe has been the source of most of my pc problems over the last 2 years and I've just dealt with them as they occured. I have had to seriously tweak everything in cmos to get it stable (including underclocking lol). And no, there were no heat issues, no ps issues, it was simply the crappiest motherboard I've ever bought. This board isn't so bad that Kingston won't even support RAM issues on it anymore lol.

I looked at Abit's and they didn't have the features I wanted for the AMD's. At least not the ones they had on newegg.

The only other brands they had were evga (which I like their graphics cards, but not sure about mainboards) and foxconn.

I have experience with the biostar boards here at work and they seem to be pretty solid.

Anyways, I really appreciate everyones input so far! I can't wait to play it! 64 bit CS:S!

Spyder

1: I'll bet dollars to donuts you had rev 1.1 on that Asus mobo. Caused so many problems for so many people. Upgrade to 1.3 fixed pretty much any/all mobo related problems that board had.

2: Kingston is at best the #3 ram company out there, and they've been rep'd as being a value-brand type company for a very long time. I don't care who they don't support

Moving on to important stuff. Enermax is generally a very solid brand. I just know that there have been reports of some of their 600W model PSU's having some issues, which was why hte heads-up.

Xp 64 is not worth it. Stick with regular 32-bit XP.

__________________
a.k.a. NinjaPirateAssassin
Celibacy is not Hereditary.
Everybody should believe in something - I believe I'll have another drink.
Happiness is like wetting your pants, everyone can see it but only you can feel the warmth.
Flying is easy, Just throw yourself at the ground and miss!

Apex

I did.

Then I RMA it and got the newest revision and it was better..... For a while... Then started having problems again. It just seems the memory controllers on those aren't very good.

Left a very sour taste in my mouth that's for sure. Used to be a huge Asus fan. Not anymore. If they can't release sturdy products for the amount they charge then it's a ripoff. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Why is 64 not worth it?

phaze

Forget XP64 you will encounter lots of problem with various games. I found it had some conflicts with steam. Also there are less choices of Drivers.

Why are you not building a conroe system? When the conroe chips are so cheap and futureproof. Even the botom of the range chip ' Intel Core 2 DUO E6300' way out performs the X2 AMD chips at stock. There are reports of overclocks well over 3.2GHz.

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Spyder

XP64 was kind of a "hey look, a 64 bit chip. Let's release an XP with a bigger number that "supports" it and make more money" kind of operating system. It's very hapdash and has many issues. Chances are you won't see any improvement over standard 32-bit XP. I'd wait for vista, which I assume will be designed around 64-bit if you're that concerned about it.

__________________
a.k.a. NinjaPirateAssassin
Celibacy is not Hereditary.
Everybody should believe in something - I believe I'll have another drink.
Happiness is like wetting your pants, everyone can see it but only you can feel the warmth.
Flying is easy, Just throw yourself at the ground and miss!

Apex

Well I got it built. Ran into problems with the hdd not being recognized so I returned it for another and after that everything went smoothly.

I put xp64 on it and have not had any issues. It's extremely solid in fact. The BioStar mainboard is really pretty nice. It came with a whole bunch of extras and it has a lot of great features.

I went with AMD because I like AMD Maybe the Intel is faster, but this rig is very, very fast. I bought Nvidia over ATI because well, I like Nvidia . If it were a night and day difference between the two chips, I may have considered the Intel, but I doubt it's night and day. The reviews I read were very close.

doorway 27

Man you blew it, you really should have gotten a T1000 Neural Net Processor, A Learning Computer from Gateway...


Arnold Calls Gateway!

I know this is old but it kills me everytime.

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Apex

Hahaha. Terminator rules!