I had very good experiences with VIA chipsets on Socket A.

Ditto to Mau1wurf1977 above. I found the KT333 & KT400 chipsets to be pretty solid & good performers during that time period. Just make sure you install the VIA 4-in-1 drivers.

nForce 2 was, if memory serves, the undisputed "top of the line" for 462 chipsets. The exception to this - if there is/was one - was VIA's KT880 which was used in the SOYO Dragon board. Unfortunately I never came upon one of those. nF2 & KT880 were also distinguished by having support for dual-channel memory & were the only chipsets that had that on Socket A. But Athlon XP doesn't benefit from dual-channel meaning the performance gains were generally under 5%.

One caveat with VIA - you didn't mention storage, but depending upon how modern you want to get - the VIA chipsets through at least KT333 used a southbridge with the VT8237 Serial ATA controller. It's not all that impressive and will have problems with modern drives (unless you can jumper them into compatibility mode). It also doesn't support NCQ and I don't think it supports hot-plugging either.

If you have your heart set on NF2, I recall the A7N8X-E being a great board. But I don't think you'll be disappointed with VIA either, the Serial ATA caveat aside.

What do you think of ga-7n400s? I have found one locally for next to nothing.

Should be great!

Nice, going to do a few socket A builds this summer but better the board the better things are going to go especially if there is 12v source for the cpu (eps 4pin).

nForce2 is the best choice IMO, I had an A7N8X-E Deluxe, the ASUS flasgship, and it was a dream. I have now the same build with the cheapest ASUS board of the time, the A7X8X and I notice some difference.
A7N8X-E Deluxe has SATA.

Nranco wrote:

nForce2 is the best choice IMO, I had an A7N8X-E Deluxe, the ASUS flasgship, and it was a dream. I have now the same build with the cheapest ASUS board of the time, the A7X8X and I notice some difference.
A7N8X-E Deluxe has SATA.

I'm using A7N8X-E Deluxe in my Barton build. Great board. Bought it brand new in 2004 after reading reviews 😀

Seems myself did some good choices back in 2004 as the setup (with motherboard, GFX card (6800GT) and Thermaltake SP-97 copper heatpipe cooler) is pretty good in hindsight from a retrobuild perspective.

A7N8X-* and A7V600-* are both great boards for a Barton setup.

Back in the day, mine was a 2800+ on the latter, with a Radeon 9800XT. That thing kicked ass for ages.

I had a Abit nf7-s also a very good socket A board,a lot of overclocking options,my 2500+ Barton ran at 3200+ speed for a long time without problems,only bad thing about the board was the chipset cooler,with time it became very noise,so i had to change it with a passive zalman cooler.

So I called the guy and picked up the motherboard. He had Athlon 2500+ installed as he showed me that the board is working, I used the spec to confirm it was Barton core and bought it too.

I also looked around the garage and found Elitgroup N2U400-A with Sempron 2200+ and a cooler. It has much less features and looks overall worse built. However, it has onboard LAN, the one thing I wish GA-7N400s had.

I mounted a Zalman NB47J north bridge cooler instead of small stock one and glued a small heatsink to the southbridge. Of course, both were mounted on thermal paste, I have no lack of it.

As for CPU cooler, the one I bought with the mobo is some nameless Titan with an ugly grill. It has a good heatsink with copper core and aluminium body. The one I found in the garage is Igloo 2460 with solid aluminium heatsink. I removed the fans (after years of service I do not expect them to last long), equipped the best heatsink with Arctic Cooling F8 80x80 case fan and that is pretty much it. Now I really like the way it looks.

The GPU on the last picture is Sapphire 9600XT. I don't know if I should get FireGL 8800, it's a little problematic and I already like what I see here.

Pics:

I have BOTH an Asus a7V333 and A7V600 with athlon XP 2400+ processors. Both have been VERY reliable.

Iam using 2 MSI boards here;

One is a MSI k7N2 DELTA2 LSR the other is MSI k7N2 DELTA2 FSR.. Both are N-force 2 Ultra chipset too. Only these boards doesnt have trough holes for a waterblock on the socket. The asus have..
But i generally like the looks of these boards.

I love how these boards are so colourful to differentiate themselves.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I love how these boards are so colourful to differentiate themselves.

I always found Soyo's Dragon family of motherboards, as well as the DFI Lanparty boards, to be almost amusingly colorful.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I love how these boards are so colourful to differentiate themselves.

Me too! The gigabyte one in particular looks like a meccano with colorful sockets and slots.

I'm looking forward to getting a good case with PSU and HDD. In the meantime I might as well drop a radeon 9550GE in Elitgroup
motherboard to have a second PC for LAN parties.

Thanks to everyone for the comments!

Great boards, i've had a lot of success with the nforce 2 chipset, both on Abit NF7 ver 2.0 and MSI K7N2(also a very brightly coloured board).

Here's my MSI setup 😀
Athlon XP rescued from oblivion.

Best regards,
Chris

RacoonRider wrote:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/99196890/vogons/P1020896.JPG […]
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I had the VIA version of that board(GA-7VT880-RZ),except it used a 800MHz FSB,due to the chipset being VT880.It was basically the same board you have,except the socket was mounted horizontally and the chipset was VIA VT880.

Got myself a 9800Pro from a local guy and a huge VGA cooler from China! It took some work with a rasp and sandpaper to install it the way I wanted. Here's the giant:

I would go nforce2 Ultra 400 unless one wants AGP 2x compatibility. In that case a KT333 mobo. Or KT133A if ISA is sought after. Check for .13u CPU compatibility on the older boards.