Which mboard to choose

S

superbug

Geek Trainee
I'm building a new low-cost system, but of course, I want it to work on a decent level, with room for improvement later on. I always disregarded motherboards with integrated vga in the past. Now, since the new boards have additional pcie slots, allowing to add a new vga card later on, I'm thinking about it. Right now I'm thinking in choosing one of those:

- Gigabyte GA-M61PM-S2 (with integrated vga, gf6100)
(GIGABYTE - Product - Motherboard - Specification)
- Gigabyte GA-M55S-S3 + cheap pcie vga (something like gf6200)
(GIGABYTE - Product - Motherboard - Specification)

The difference in price is pretty big, I'm wondering what's the difference in performance (assuming optimal conditions). First board is based on nf430, second on nf550. I don't see any other differences in specs that can matter in this case (no need for SPDIF, and I don't see much use for other pcie slots in this setup). Are there any other things I should watch out for? Does nf550 have a lot of improvements compared to nf430?

Edit: also taking this one into consideration:
Asus M2NPV-VM GF6150
(ASUSTeK Computer Inc.)
 
get the cheapest one. the chipset has not improved much and u would get nothing significant out of it. after all, they all have a pci-e for VGA cards.

good luck
 
the second one with the GF6200 is basically the same feature wise, only difference i can see are different ethernet controller, no cpu fan/speed detection with the first one and that the first one is Micro ATX as the one with the GF6200 is ATX.

So depends if you want ATX and the cpu fan speed detection (allows you to control fan speeds and turn case fans off, preety usefull for loud loud loud computers :P), if it was me choosing, i would got for the GF6200 just because of the fan speed, but that depends on the price difference.

The first one is just fine though :).

The asus mobo seems to have more features, but i have only skimmed that, i think maybe the Asus one would be better for overclocking? i heard Gigabyte aint really designing there motherboard to overclock, at least thats what i heard quite some time ago about some of there older mobos like the one i have, but dont take my word for that, someone else might know.
 
Thanks for the answers. From what I saw, all of them have cpu fan speed detection, and control it according to the temperature. They all have overclocking options too (Asus needs ntune for good results, Gigabyte has hidden options for it). I read some more about micro-ATX boards with integrated graphics and it seems like a pretty good choice, so I think I'll go with Asus board.
 
Yea all the boards have options to control the fan speeds, all motherboards do, i mean the gigabyte one with the GF6200 has the ability for you to actually manually change the fan speeds, so if you downloaded a program like SpeedFan, you could turn fans totally off, or put them fully to %100
 
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