Best Athlon MP motherboard?

[studtrooper]

Sup? Well, I was considering upgrading the old PC the other day (check my current specs) for a new Athlon MP setup. What I had in mind is getting two Mobile Athlon XP 2600+ Bartons and having someone mod them into MPs. What my question is, is there a Athlon MP motherboard that has all (or most) of these features:

1. a AGP/PCI lock (for worryless overclocking)
2. Ample OC'ing [FSB and multiplier] and voltage control BIOS options
3. AGP 8x (I wish PCI-E but I doubt we'll be seeing those for awhile on AMD boards)
4. onboard goodies (ethernet, good audio, firewire [not too importaint], USB 2.0, etc.)
5. ATX form-factor compatable (would be nice anyway)
6. the ability to use PC3200 ram (i don't care if it isn't officially supported as long as I can OC to 200fsb)

Thanks for taking a look at my query

[mrtristan]

Just out of curiosity, why would you want to overclock a dual 2600+ system? It should be plenty fast for anything you have in mind. Especially with the barton cores. Good luck getting them to work.

[rallynavvie]

The fastest official core release of the MP was 266 FSB so there aren't many OCing candidates for these procs. You can often get away with 333 but 400 may be right out. I know the new revision Tyan 2460 can handle XP-M 2400s as 2800s with some mods. The 760 MPX chipset also requires ECC reg RAM in most cases (or one of the two). On top of it all there aren't many MP boards still being manufactured. I've still got my 2460 running two 1900 MPs, freshly back from an RMA because Tyan rocks (and because I had an old revision board). If you were to get a board I'd recommend the 2466, but you will need a good sound card and a combo FireWire/USB 2 card. Better warranty and stability give it the edge over the cheaper Gigabyte board.

Are you sure you don't want to try an Opteron or Xeon system? I'm not too familiar with Opterons but I can source out a Xeon system for not too much. Boards cost about the same anyways...

[studtrooper]

I am actually split beween Xeon and MP right now (Opterons cost a little too much ATM). If I were going the Xeon route, I would get a ASUS PC-DL with 2x 2.4ghz '533mhz' Xeons. I also really love that it doesn't require ECC/Registered ram plus it has everything I need. Its just that I could save like $200 or more going the AMD route with some OC'ing. But, now that I know that is more or less not happening, I think I will just save up for a nice Xeon system. The only thing that makes me kinda worry is that the Xeons will be 32-bit only and no PCI-E. Oh well, can't win them all Thanks for the imput guys.