VIA Motherboards:

While the PT800 chipset release has shown that VIA still has the value-oriented consumer in mind, it still falls short of the performance offered by its competition. Intel continues to provide the best value with their 875P chipset features and performance.

On the AMD side VIA struts its stuff when it comes to the Athlon 64 and Opterons. While the KT600 and its variants fail to compete with NVIDIA's nForce2 platform, the K8T800, continues to be the favorite chipset for AMD- powered 64-bit computing.

For our weekly VIA recommendation we would strongly suggest either the Soltek SL-K8AV2-RL or the AOpen AK86-L. Both boards are well under $100 and come with plenty of features. Combined with some decent ram and an Athlon 64 3000+ you can build yourself a real Athlon XP killer.

AMD NVIDIA Motherboards Intel Motherboards
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  • MadAd - Wednesday, April 28, 2004 - link

    Typo in very last sentence: but we probably still wont need them for at least another yet.

    Perhaps you were still deciding how long it will be and forgot to update it when publising? :)
  • TrogdorJW - Wednesday, April 28, 2004 - link

    I just like how they recommend the Soltek SL-K8AV2-RL as one of the two options for an Athlon 64 motherboard, but it isn't even listed in their prices below. Oops.

    Actually, here's something I would really like to see: a hard core review of some of the Albatron motherboards that include the Via Envy audio (or one of the boards using the new Realtek chip). Are these Albatron boards good, or are Asus, Abit, and MSI still better?
  • Klober - Tuesday, April 27, 2004 - link

    I'm curious why the AOpen AK89 Max is not included in this Price Guide. After the shining review I thought for sure it would be here. Could it possibly included in the next Guide? Thanks!

    Rob Niccum
  • kiedis - Tuesday, April 27, 2004 - link

    the only thing i cannot really understand is why the article calls "cpu and MEMORY" while reviewed are only cpus and mobos.. =)

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