After some trials and tribulations with the mobo I ordered to get RAID 1 working @ home, I finally broke down and picked up a new motherboard and processor. After doing some reading and price comparisons, I decided on the MSI K8N Platinum Pro with an Athlon64 3200+ processor. All my other system components stayed the same, as I didn’t feel like changing out everything, and this whole journey has been costly enough already.
Initial impressions of the combo: much quicker than the Athlon 2500+ I used to have, especially for CPU intensive things, like encoding audio. I don’t play a ton of games, but the ones I do play seem to have a bit more pep. The main thing is that this thing has been quite stable, unlike the Asus A7V600 I was using. That board and the chipset it uses have some known issues that were causing my system to freeze up every few hours, leading to quite a bit of frustration. Unfortunatley, I’m out of the RMA period for the ASUS board, and the hassle of returning it outweighs the money I’d save by getting it replaced, so for the moment I’m stuck with it.
At least it was cheap.