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Looking for an Matx motherboard for socket A £80 absolute max i want to spend on it. Needs
Overclocking ability, not going for anything to serious just upping the FSB a bit
Onboard GFX and Sound won't be buying a GFX card for a few months after i get the motherboard so something that'll keep my going till then
Will be using a barton 2500+ or similiar and cheap DDR400
thanks
Dabs have a Biostar (under Dabs Value) nForce2 mobo with GeForce 4 MX graphics, 5.1 sound and 3 Dimm Slots :)
Tis even got TV-Out on board!
If you want to overclock then i advise to aviod all intergrated GFX cards. They do limit fsb overclocking a lot.
Onboard sound is usually on the boarder of complete rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishe and i can only recommend sound storm if you want decent sound. anything else will sound resonably rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishe but you get used to it if you dont listen to music from other sources for a while.
The main reson I advise not to get a intergrated gfx is you could for £80 get a very decent sA mobo (nf7-s r2 for example) and ge a very cheap pci card. infact you could get a cheap sA mobo (k7s5a for example) and a semi-decent gfx (9500np softmoddable for example) which will defnatly give better performance than intergrated gf4...
note: 9500 and other recent cards do NOT fit in some old mobos, I think the k7s5a might be one of them. I know v5 5500 didnt fit in my nf7-s while it fitted in my k7s5a so I assume the oposite is true also.
Try the Asus A7N8X-MX here, at http://www.dabs.com/uk/productview?quicklinx=2P33.
komplett do the epox 8RGMI+
£50
http://www.komplett.co.uk/k/ki.asp?sku=119199&cks=PRL
nice board, got one at work, done a little overclocking not to much though.
bought the Asus and hated it, very limited with options ect but now have the epox and love it, even been able to overclock my locked XP2500 too 2400mhz on it , does dislike twinmos ram though, got some geil on it's way so hopefully that'll be better :)
I'd go with the ASUS A7N8X-VM, only heard good things - its around £75.
i hated my asus had very very few options at all and was unstable from the moment i got it out the box, more bother then it was worth the epox is a much better buy
I've used the Asus, and hated it. YMMV :D