Price Guides, February 2005: Motherboards

Other AMD

Athlon XP motherboards are still in vogue these days, although it's getting harder and harder to justify why. With VIA left as the only active participant in the Socket 462 market, your options these days are very limited.

There is still a ton of inventory on the nForce2 end of things – particularly for the single channel motherboards. However, prices have gone up every model and the nForce2 IGP is getting a little long in the teeth. IGP doesn't make a whole lot of sense right now, considering the dirt cheap prices on NVIDIA TurboCache cards, but we will leave that analysis to next week's GPU guide. Again, the reasons for sticking with Socket 462 are fading fast.

KT880 is clearly the most mature solution on the Socket 462 market, but motherboard vendors are somewhat sporadic. Overclocking Athlon XP mobility chips on some of the Tier 2 motherboards probably won't yield expected results, but the Tier 1 components are selling at nearly the same price of the Athlon 64 components. Take our advice – stick with Athlon 64. If anything, the announcements of Windows x64 RC2 and Intel's unilateral support for 64-bit should be enough to sway nay sayers into the 64-bit camp.

ASUS (again) pretty much dominates the Athlon XP camp with the A7V880 [RTPE: A7V880]. The KT880 stands as the most mature and one of the cheapest Athlon XP motherboards available.

Given that there will be no more revisions from anyone on Socket 462 core logic, it's pretty safe to say that you definitely want to buy a motherboard that has some longevity in it if you don't want to get stuck "eBay'ing" your Athlon XP in a few months. One trick that we like to do is frequently check the number of "refurbished" items at resellers. If you see several refurbished motherboards for a particular SKU, people are obviously returning the motherboards for one reason or another.