Best S775 mobo sub £100?

[eUphoria]

Is the P35 chipset the one to go with? Looking at getting the MSI P35 NEO2-FR - can anyone suggest a better mobo and why?

[NightshadowUK]

Depends what your requirements are, what CPU will you be using? Will you be overclocking / watercooling? Can you see yourself using DDR3 memory in the near future?

[Wyoming]

The Gigabyte GA-P31-DS3L is sub-£50 from scan and in Custom PC's recent batch test was the best rated sub-£100 mobo and it got the "Custom PC Approved" award.

Its price, 1333MHz compatibility and speed make it a great motherboard for 775 on a budget.

[LegacyOne]

Asus P5K-E/WIFI-AP

[staffsMike]

I don't trust MSI's quality personally having had some bad boards in the past.

Given there amazing level of support I would have the abit IP-35 (dark raider)

They have the hexus care forum which is very handy for getting issues you may have resolved and the overall quality is outstanding.

Ignoring service the Asus above is a very good baord.

[eUphoria]

Depends what your requirements are, what CPU will you be using? Will you be overclocking / watercooling? Can you see yourself using DDR3 memory in the near future?

Holding out for an E8400 when somewhere has them in stock, DDR 2 platform, on air

[eUphoria]

All good suggestions - thanks! I was looking at the asus and abit mobo's as well, have used asus boards for a while now - excellent. Never had an msi.

Interesting re the GA-P31-DS3L - will get reading some reviews, anyone used one of these?

[Pob255]

I've got the MSI Noe2-FR, must say I'm very impressed with it so far.
Overall it's a very nice lay out and I've only had a couple of very minor niggles.
Don't try to use it with the coolermaster 500w PSU as they appear to be incompattable (no reported problems with any other brand or model as yet)

Although I've also helped a friend build a pc with the Abit IP-35 and it's a nice solid board as well.
One thing to watch out for on the IP35 is to frist power it up with only 1 stick of DDR2 in to set the memory voltage. Most memory requires more than the default 1.8v and the IP35 has the habbit of refuseing to boot if it's got more than one memory stick at the 1.8v default.

Use a large amount of MSI motherboards at work, have no real problems with them, only real problem is finding drivers as the ones that come in our prebuilt systems have differnt model numbers that are never found on a search of the MSI website.
Basically they are OEM and I have to dig around on google to find which model they actually are. However that said the Neo2-FR is not oem and easy to find the driver page.

One other thing the Neo2-FR has some built in automatic overclocking stuff, both in the BIOS and a windows utility. It's supposed to alow it to automatically oc as demand on the system increases, the windows utility allows you to change the overclocking settings on-the-fly from within windows.
I say supposedly because I've not used it yet, I've just tweeked a couple of settings and bumped the FSB up to 333mhz to run my e6600 at 3ghz.

[gurpz1]

Asus P5K-E/WIFI-AP

i second that, wickid board

[donkiddik]

i second that, wickid board

I third that, good board

[chrestomanci]

I now have two systems based on the Gigabyte GA-G33M-DS2R. It has loads of features, all in a nice mATX package, and has been nice and stable for me. It has Integrated graphics if you want to build a low end system for web surfing, and if you don't; support for Quad core Yorkfield, 8Gb of system RAM and a PEG-16 slot. There is also a 4x PCIe slot with an open back that would take a second graphics card if you wanted to.

[Agent]

I don't trust MSI's quality personally having had some bad boards in the past.

Given there amazing level of support I would have the abit IP-35 (dark raider)

They have the hexus care forum which is very handy for getting issues you may have resolved and the overall quality is outstanding.

Ignoring service the Asus above is a very good baord.

Fully agree. The IP-35 boards and blinking brlliant.

To be fair, all the modern Abit boards have been top. I'm on a QuadGT at the moment running a E6300 @ 3.3gighz It will bench @ 3.4, but unstable. I'm sure I can get it there

[NightshadowUK]

The C2 builds I've done so far have all had Gigabyte motherboards and I've gotta say I wasn't impressed with any of the BIOSes. I found them very vague, with settings like 'low', 'medium' and 'high' rather than actual values.

That might have just been the lower end boards though... (?)

[eUphoria]

Asus boards sounding popular and so is that abit ip35, not hearing many good things about the msi then.

There seem to be a fair few derivatives of the Asus P5* p35 boards - other than the obvious issue of the deluxe using ddr3 only, what else is there to choose between them? I presume they will all support wolfdale chips?

[[GSV]Trig]

Asus P5K-E/WIFI-AP

Agree'd

[Happyman88]

Cool