i want to buy a new motherboard but dont know what to see in one, what should i have, what shudnt i have, what extras could i get for a same price or wateva. i am looking to spend a max of 150pounds of the new mobo plz help thanks Gav
Well the most important thing in a motherboard is the chipset. What you want is either the Springdale or the Canterwood if you go intel or the nforce2 if you go AMD. Before we go any further, what cpu will you use, intel or amd ?
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/prod...2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=50157 Asus P4P800VM SKT478 I865G MATX VGA Sound LAN USB2 (link abpve for page on this mobo) im going to be using an intel cpu, pentuim 4 2.6 im going to buy possibly and bigB can you explain to me more about what i would want?
Okay, we can do some explaining. Boards are more and more integrated these days, particularly the high-end ones. There is some stuff that's optional, and if you're not going to use it, why pay for it, right? LAN: Do you want an integrated network adapter with your board. This is a biggie for me, though it's not going to completely knock that board from my list. Unless you want a specific NIC (like an Intel or 3Com), any modern day NIC will be fine. Having this integrated is a good thing in most cases (server setups can be an exception) as you're not really gonna find any additional benefit from using a standalone card. Video: If you plan on doing any gaming at all, skip any board with on-board video. If you're thinking that you could use it as part of a dual-monitor setup, sorry, that won't work. Most on-board VGA cards run through the AGP bus, so if you pop in an AGP video card, you'll have to disable the onboard (if it doesn't automatically disable itself, this varies from motherboard to motherboard). As far as gaming goes, these weren't designed with that in mind, although the Radeon 9100 IGP is the sole exception for the Intel side of things. Audio: Generally, these are okay, but if you want good sound, a standalone card is generally better. Typically, an AC97 audio is used, but the better ones are C-Media and Via's Vinyl Audio. The C-Media isn't bad, but the lack of a software equalizer is my main issue with their drivers. The Vinyl Audio can be pretty good, but it depends on the DAC chip used with it. RAID, IDE: I like this because I can hook up more hard drives on their own channel. If you want, you can setup a RAID solution, but I don't simply because the benefits haven't been all that impressive to me. As a general rule, you can't use CD-ROMs, DVD drives, etc (any non-HDD) on these controllers. The two you'll see most are from Promise and Highpoint. RAID, SATA: Any i875/i865 board with ICH5R will have SATA RAID available. There may also be additional SATA ports available with a Promise 1 IDE/2 SATA RAID chip or a Silicon Image SATA chip. It's not necessary, but this is something I'd highly recommend if you're going to build a new box from scratch. USB2.0: Anything you'll be buying will have this. You'll have at least 2 ports, but that can go as high as 8 ports total. It's not uncommon to see 4 USB 2.0 ports on the motherboard's I/O panel (with the Keyboard and mouse, Parallel, Serial ports, Audio, LAN). IEEE1394 or Firewire: If you're going to do video editing, this isn't a bad thing to have---in fact, you'd be best off to have it one way or another. Many boards come with this, but not all, and they're generally found on the more loaded boards. mATX: This is a micro ATX motherboard formfactor. It's not as long as an ATX board, so you'll have something along the lines of 1 AGP (many mATX boards don't have an AGP slot) and 2-3 PCI slots. If you'd like to overclock, mATX boards generally don't have much in the way of options to do this. You don't have extra IDE or SATA RAID controllers at all. SATA will only come if ICH5R is present. ATX: If you want as much stuff as possible on your motherboard, you'll have to go ATX. You get 1 AGP slot and 5-6 PCI slots, which leaves you more flexibility in the way of upgrades. Abit's IS7 (i865PE) and IC7 (i876P) boards are pretty nice, and you can get most of the stuff I mentioned. If that's not up your alley, Gigabyte and MSI are generally good. It's not that Asus is bad, but I've found them to be pricey and not offer some of the RAID options I've been intrested in.
