Biostar Motherboard Questions

--

Hello,

I am going to build a Biostar K8M800 (AM2 socket) board with a AMD
Athlon 3800+ 64 X2 and Kingston PC3200 DDR2 memory. I have two
questions I hope someone can advise me on. Can I get Vista to run on
this board. My thinking is Vista might have drivers to support this
board or maybe the WinXP chipset drivers might work? Also, could
someone recommend a PSU? Any help or advice would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Comstat

Viper wrote:
>
>
> Hello,
>
> I am going to build a Biostar K8M800 (AM2 socket) board with a AMD
> Athlon 3800+ 64 X2 and Kingston PC3200 DDR2 memory. I have two
> questions I hope someone can advise me on. Can I get Vista to run on
> this board. My thinking is Vista might have drivers to support this
> board or maybe the WinXP chipset drivers might work? Also, could
> someone recommend a PSU? Any help or advice would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Comstat

First of all, be careful where you stick your signature delimiter in
a posting. The "-- \n" belongs after the body of your post. When I
tried to reply to your post, the reply text ended up blank, because
you stuck the "-- \n" too high in the posting. I had to fix it
manually. (If you ever make a long posting, nobody might answer,
because it would take too much work to correct it.)

According to the Newegg entry, these are the main chips on the Biostar board.

North Bridge VIA K8M800
South Bridge VT8237R+

If I go to viaarena.com and look for drivers, the Vista driver for integrated
graphics is labeled "Chrome 9". The K8M800, is "Unichrome Pro", so not
covered by that driver. My initial impression is they aren't the same thing.

http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/ch...m800/index.jsp

If your plan was to use a separate video card, then the lack of integrated
graphics driver is not a problem. Just make sure your video card is
recent enough, to have Vista support.

There seem to be "chipset/platform" drivers for Vista on the viaarena.com
site. Including a RAID driver for 8237R.

So you may want to look through the various items offered on Viaarena.com
and convince yourself you've got enough to run Vista.

For a PSU, stick with brand names. If you want some rough guidance,
stay away from "Tier 5" brands, in this thread that is a couple
years old. Also remember that much power supply design is contracted
out, so any individual company or brand can have a mix of good and
bad products. For example, a lot of high efficiency supplies (>80%),
come from Seasonic, and the companies are not making those themselves.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=108088

And stay away from products that look like this :-) ( Powmax )
If a product pretends to shoot flames, it probably does :-)

http://c1.neweggimages.com/NeweggIma...163-018-06.JPG

Paul

"Viper" <Viper@Comstat.net> wrote in message
news:xn0ftbqpzv9xo000@news.east.cox.net...
>
>
> --
>
> Hello,
>
> I am going to build a Biostar K8M800 (AM2 socket) board with a AMD
> Athlon 3800+ 64 X2 and Kingston PC3200 DDR2 memory. I have two
> questions I hope someone can advise me on. Can I get Vista to run on
> this board. My thinking is Vista might have drivers to support this
> board or maybe the WinXP chipset drivers might work? Also, could
> someone recommend a PSU? Any help or advice would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Comstat

check the website at
http://www.biostar-usa.com/app/en-us...t.php?S_ID=141
no mention of vista support so there may be issues the driver page does not
list a driver for the o-b video or USB 2.0
http://www.biostar-usa.com/app/en-us...r.php?S_ID=141

Derek