I’m thinking of upgrading my wife’s computer. Hell, I’ve recently thought of upgrading both of ours. At the moment, I’m thinking kind of cheap, so I looked on eBay, and found this
800 FSB Pentium 4 Mainboard W/ Video + Snd + Nic $26 ! ONLY $26.99 LoWeSt pRiCe ANYWHERE ! A+ Warranty !
Now, it seems to have everything I want, 800mhz frontside bus and supports 3.2gigs of ram (although 2 would be good enough for me), but the low, low price makes me pause.
I’ver heard that PCCHIPS doesn’t exactly make the greatest motherboards, but if the most one of these would be used for would be surfing the Internet, and playing the SIMMS 2, would it be a halfway decent motherboard? Or am I risking buying a piece of crap that’ll fall apart a month after I buy it?
I’ve had an experience with a few PCCHIPS boards. I don’t know what the quality is now, but based on their K6-II era boards I will never buy a PCCHIPS board ever again. Hell, I wouldn’t take one for free. The ones I dealt with(new, not damaged) exhibited one or more of the following:
a) Random FSB setting every boot on a K6-II board, including supposedly impossible setting leading to CPU clock frequencies between 100Mhz and 333Mhz including odd ones like 171Mhz.
b) Random forgetting parts of the CMOS setup, losing time, random values. Replacing the battery didn’t help.
c) The onboard audio drivers didn’t really exist. The ones that came with it would randomly lose right channel, the new ones downloaded off the website didn’t have the problem but caused bluescreens. The audio chipset was unknown.
d) 3d acceleration with any external video card just refused to work with D3D or OpenGL on 2 different PCCHIPS boards.
I’m not saying you will have these problems. These problems are ancient. However, this seems representative of other people’s experience with the boards.
I am firmly convinced that one should never buy a discount motherboard. I tried that when I built my computer last year and paid dearly. After dozens of hours of fixing it and prodding it along, it kind of died. I had to buy a real motherboard and put in everything around it.
Reviews that I have read say the same thing. You may get lucky and not have any problems but you are always sitting on a landmine.
You’ve kind of confirmed what I was already thinking. I’ve heard nothing but bad things about PCchips, so I guess I’ll stay away. Thanks.
Yeah, I know, you get what you pay for, and if I decide to go cheap (I haven’t made up my mind on it yet), I know that that’s the risk I’ll be taking.
You plopping an existing cpu in that thing? There are some great cpu/mobo combos that are pretty good quality and inexpensive.
Just to add I had a PCchip motherboard w/ a k6-2 and k6-3 with no problems (same motherboard). But I would NEVER buy anything from anyone who can’t use proper lowercase and caps on the words lowest prices.
Heck I would accept:
lowest prices
Lowest Prices
Lowest prices
and even
LOWEST PRICES
but no way in heck would I even consider what you posted, worse then most sp4M emails
Well, I’d mainly be getting one for my wife, and she already has a P4 2.5ghz CPU, not to shabby, but eventually, I want to get her a 3.0ghz or so, but in the meantime, I can install her current CPU into a new motherboard.
My currrent motherboard and CPU are obsolete, so I couldn’t use my own Celeron 1.0ghz CPU in any new motherboard, but my plan is, when I upgrade her motherboard, I’ll take her CPU and use it for myself.
Or rather, when I upgrade her CPU.
Being a bad speller myself, I choose to remain silent on the matter. :o