[pyro-manic]

Umm, what do you mean? Don't do what?


EDIT:
Yep. Northbridge is toast. Pooter has been junked, and is now in pieces on my desk, pending new bits. That's another couple of hundred quid out the window. Oh, well.....

[JC Denton]

Well, if you're willing to stick with Gigabyte, then look at the GA-7VAX or VAXP/VAXP Ultra:

7VAX (what I've got)

7VAXP

7VAXP Ultra

Mine seems pretty solidly built.  My only problems are with heat buildup (and that's more of a case design issue).  Although I'm planning on replacing the CPU fan because, frankly, the stock AMD ones just don't cut it.  The chipset heatsink is all copper, and is clamped on pretty tight (about like a good vidcard heatsink/fan).  Although if you can find a better one than what comes on the mobo, you can try swapping it out.

[Admiral LSD]

Via...

nForce2-based boards would be a better idea for AMD machines these days. Gigabyte apparently have nForce2 boards in the works but who knows when they'll arrive or even if they'll arrive at all. I'd recommend the EPoX 8RDA+ myself not only because it's the board I have but also because few nForce2 boards are able to match its feature set of AGP8X, Dual DDR, USB2, Firewire, LAN, SoundStorm audio, ATA133 and 6 PCI slots for anywhere near the USD$80-100 being asked for it.

[pyro-manic]

Hmm. I like the sound of that, Admiral. I'll have a look for it.

The best I've found so far is the ASUS A7N8X Deluxe: nForce2, dual DDR400, USB2, Firewire, Dual 3Com LAN, AGP 8X, Serial ATA-150, nVidia Soundstorm audio, C.O.P. (CPU Overheat Protection) circuit, Q-Fan technology (automatically adjusts fan speeds depending on system load), 5 PCI slots.

This costs just under a hundred quid, but I think it's worth it for the features and performance, and the reviewers seem to like it a lot. I might go for this...

I'm not really keen on Gigabyte, to be honest - the quality of my current (dead) one doesn't seem that high, and I don't want to pay another £100 just to have it fail on me again. Also, their technical support isn't exactly marvellous, which has made it difficult for me to find help in the past.

JC: I'm looking at the Northbridge heatsink from QuietPC, and possibly their Flower Cooler for my new CPU (probably an Athlon XP 2600 or a Barton XP 2500, depending on what I can afford to pay), because they're almost silent. I'm also gonna get two 92mm fans for the case to cool the thing down, along with round IDE cables to let the air move.

Or, I could go really over the top, and get a dual CPU mobo with two Athlon MP 2000's... .....though that'd be a bit expensive. I wouldn't be able to buy them for about three months, which would leave me stuck on this iMac with no games.

Whaddaya think?

[Admiral LSD]

Personally, I feel the price for the A7N8X (and Abit's NF7-S offerin, it has the same problem) is a little over the top, even considering it's extra features as the biggest of them, SATA, is only an expensive novelty and best avoided in the short term. I'd stick to the cheaper boards that lack SATA for the time being until the SATA situation sorts itself out (by which time virtually any controller bought now would be hopelessly outdated). Another board worth avoiding is Chaintech's 7NJS which foregoes the nForce2 APU altogether in favour of an infinitely inferior C-Media PCI sound chip.