Hi, I have three questions.

1. Is the SiS or VIA motherboard chipsets any good?

2. Im thinking of gettin a athlon 64 2800+ or a athlon 64 3000+, but there are so many cores. Which ones are good and which ones are not?

3. Alot of my friends are dissing the MicroATX case. Is there anything wrong with it?

SiS chipsets are crap

nForce is the chipset to get. VIA is OK, SiS is crap. I've read some good reviews on ULi chipsets, but really don't know much about them. The nForce is considered to be the king.

Are you looking at S754 or S939?

The best chipset for S754 is one from the nForce3 series...either the nForce3 250, or 250Gb, or Ultra. Another choice would be the nForce4-4X. If you go with VIA, get the K8T800 Pro or K8T890.

The best chipset for the S939 is either the nForce4 Ultra or nForce4 SLi. The VIA chipsets for the S939 are the same as above.

If you have a true MicroATX case, it definitely limits your choices of boards...& if it must use a mATX PSU rather than a standard ATX PSU, you have a double whammy against you.

This space for rent

SiS=Fair, VIA=Good, nForce.cough.nULI=Better

Well ULi has for a while been quietly putting out solid chipsets that targets the low end of the market, not surprisingly expected their products are rarely flashy, but there are usually few complaints about the overall quality and performance of their products. This might change though with it's recent strange acquisition by NVIDIA the top performer.

Why not get 3200+ (Venice) in-place of the entry level athlon 64 2800+ ?. Odds are, you might hit 2.8 GHz on air cooling without increasing it's 1.4v core voltage.

I can understand getting a mATX system from a VAR like Dell and the rest of them but building a system from scratch with a MicroATX case is something unjustifiable at least IMHO.

I agree; computing.net does need an edit button.