I'm a complete noob building my 1st pc with an N2U400-A mobo- & i'm concerned that it might not take a Athlon xp2500"mobile" barton cpu as the mobo's overclocking options are few- (i believe that one can't change voltages to cpu!?) & i'm scared this mobo might fry a mobile cpu. or will it default to its own thing & turn out fine? If you know what i'm blathering about,please help. -onions-
It won't fry the CPU unless the motherboard rebells and the chipset frys it That's only if it goes bad and takes the CPU down with it. You can always change CPU voltages, that's the motherboard's decision The barton's are good cores. You should have no problem.
If you don't already own that board, don't get it. ECS is a bad company. Grab yourself an Abit NF7-S, Asus A7N8X or Soltek 75FRN2, the latter being the budget one (in features, not in performance as it performs better than the Asus)
ABIT is a VERY good motherboard company, has excellent overclocking abilities and is pretty much plug in and boot up. Like Harrack52 said, if you don't own the board don't buy it. I've gone through 3 ECS motherboards myself all in the time span of about 2 months. They just suck.
The board does support the Barton core, and, although you will be limited by the lack of voltage adjustments, the PCI/AGP bus is locked, just not user adjustable. If anything, at least according to the readings in BIOS, it might undervolt by just a hair. The only true way would be to use a multimeter to measure. For the money, it's a good board, unless you're wanting some heavy OCing.
