Hello everyone.

My AMD 939-Mainboard recently died and now I need a new one I read the wiki but it didn't help me a lot because there are ony a few boards reported to work with Leo.

I am thinking of buying an AM2 Mainboard with processor but I am not sure if this would be a good idea as I would like it to work out of the box without having to much tweaking as I am still quite a newbie.
I used Tubgirls 10.4.10 release and it just worked great (LAN and Sound both perfect; nforce4 partially) with my A8n-Sli. Now, as Leopard has been released and with the upcoming iATKOS in mind I wonder whether I should buy the A8N again or if I should go for a newer one?

The best (because of the price) solution for me would be buying an AM2 Mainboard with an Athlon X2 CPU. So the question is, what board (and its chipsets) will be supported the best out of the box with Leo/iATKOS (and maybe with one of the 10.4 releases) without me having to tweak? Would be great if SATA and onboard LAN could work again witout problems (I have an external USB Soundcard so onboard Sound does not necessarily need to work).

Here are the AM2-Boards I found:
ASUS (M2N4-SLI Deluxe or Professional; M2N-E; ASUS M2N32-SLI) MSI (i.e. MSI K9AGM2-FIH, K9N Diamond); Gigabyte (i.e. GA-M59SLI-S5); ABIT (i.e. FP-IN9, AN9 FATAL1TY); Foxconn (C51XEM2AA).

For Intel, the (much more expensive) solution would be buying a core2duo CPU (maybe Intel E6750 or E6850), in that case one of the following boards would be interesting:
Asus (i.e. P5W DH, P5N, P5K); Asrock; GigaByte (i.e. P35-DS3, DS4); MSI (P35 Neo2-FR); Foxconn (P35AX-S)?

So does anybody have experiences with one of those boards or could give me some advice what board I can buy (preferably AM2) that has compatible SATA- and LAN- Controller onboard? Would be really great as I am afraid of buying a new board and nothing works. In that case I would be better off buying another A8N and to stick with my working 10.4.10.

Many thanks for your help.

herbalb

If you're going to move from socket 939 to AM2, you'll need to get DDR2 ram, which then I'd advice you going with Intel instead of AMD.

Well DDR2 is quite cheap at the moment so if I sell my CPU. the defective board and the DDR1 RAM I could get an AM2 board with an even faster CPU and DDR2 RAM for nearly the same amount of money, that's why I thought of buying an AMD solution.
But as I said, I do not really care if its AMD or Intel - if I'd only knew which board to choose so that the system will run out of the box (onboard LAN and SATA) with Leo (and maybe OSX 10.4.10, too) I would go for that.

You can get an e4300 for about $120-$140 if I remember right, or go with the pentium dual core which is the conroe series as well.

That sounds good to me.

EDIT: I just ordered a P35-DS4 (Gigabyte) board. Hope everything will work as it should.

Thanks.

Yes it will work like a charm. Install in AHCI mode on sata HD.