Budget PC Motherboard

MisterAnarchy

Hey Guys,
I was asked by a buddy of mine to build him a fairly low cost PC.
He needs a machine for surfing,playing songs and the odd game or two.
Obviously it doesnt need to be too powerful.
I was thinking of a 1700XP processor and an Asus A7N266-VM motherboard.
This has onboard 5.1 sound , LAN ,and onboard graphics similiar to GeForce 2Mx.
Is this a good choice ?
It has only 3 PCI slots and 1Gb max DDR RAM.
If anyone has any better recommendations I'd love to hear them.
Many Thanks

Xithus

Great board, I got one from komplett recently and was most impressed.

So many extras for less than €100, brilliant.

unkel

My last mobo was the MSI nforce. Great board and the ASUS you are thinking of is probably the best value mobo ever @ €82 from komplett. Mind you that you would probably (not sure) need a CNR riser card to enable analog 5.1 sound (I had to on the MSI mobo). 5.1 Digital via SPDIF and normal stereo sound would work anyway.

Another tip: the nforce mobo works best with twinbank enabled. this means you have to use two identical memory sticks in slot 1 and 3. So if you were planning to have a 256MB system, buy two 128MB sticks. Also check on ASUS website which make memory is supported - the nforce can be a bit picky

I'd say go ahead and build your m8's system around this mobo - good luck with it :cool: