A7N8X-E Deluxe experiences? or other motherboard recommendations?

[Randy Kelsoe]

Benjamin J. Weiss wrote:

>I've been thinking of getting an AMD Athlon 2600+ 333MHz FSB, and an ASUS 
>A7N8X-E Deluxe mother board. 
>(http://usa.asus.com/prog/spec.asp?m=A7N8X-E%20Deluxe&langs=09)  I've seen 
>some potential issues on this list about the nforce2 chipset, so I was 
>curious about any positive or negative experiences anybody might have had 
>with this mother board.
>
>If somebody has another recommendation for a motherboard/cpu combo, I'd be 
>interested in that as well.  Basically, I'm trying to get a fast motherboard 
>and CPU with about 512Meg of RAM for about $250 US.  I'm only interested 
>in good, name brand motherboards and RAM, I've had bad experiences with 
>cheap ECS crap and don't care to repeat the experience.
>
I'm using a GigaByte GA-7N400 Pro2 mb, and it's working very well. FC1 
detected everything on install. I installed the nforce2 drivers from 
Nvidia, but did not really need to do that. This motherboard uses a 
RealTek lan chip, so the nvidia lan driver is not needed. FC1 detected 
my soundchip as an i810_audio, which worked fine. When I installed the 
nvidia audio driver, XMMS works fine, but other apps (flashplayer, 
bzflag) sound weird like the frequency has been shifted up 2 octaves, 
and there is also distortion and clipping.

ECS worked fine for me with linux.....Windows is another story....and 
ECS support is a royal pain.....

>
>The A7N8X-E Deluxe looks like it can handle two DDR 400 256 for that 
>doubled speed thing, which sounds good to me.  I don't really care too 
>much about AGP8x or  anything, since it'll be a server, not a desktop game 
>machine.
>
You will not see a speed increase by using DDR400 with a 333MHz FSB 
Athlon CPU. It may even be slower than DDR333 (PC2700). Using 
'dual-channel' memory will definitely be faster (almost 50% faster in my 
case).