What's the inside knowledge regarding choosing a motherboard?

[Anteries]

I'm looking for a good inexpensive am2+ Micro ATX motherboard with on board graphics. I understand that the 780g chipset is very good for integrated graphics. but I don't know quite how much difference there is over the older chipsets.

I'm thinking of either an AMD 5050E or one of the new Ahlon II 250 CPUs.

Just wondered if anyone had any thoughts or recommendations. I particularly into sound stuff. Voice recognition and music recording. Probably stick one of my own spare SoundBlaster cards in there. I'm also interested in low-power computing, so good energy-saving features would be really good.


Is there any particular key numbers in the specifications I should look out for.

[Sputnik]

The Asus M3A78-EM is a nice board if you want the 780G chipset.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The Asus M3A78-EM is a nice board if you want the 780G chipset.

I would go with this too and the Athlon II X2 250. If you want better onboard graphics this mATX 790GX motherboard is good too:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Biost...SATA-RAID-uATX

[Giraffe]

The 5050E is a nice processor. I built a box for a friend using the 4850E and it was quiet, cool and ran at 40W input on idle with Cool'n'Quiet enabled.
It had the 780V Northbridge and ran a 22" monitor very well (so long as you don't want fast games - solitaire's my limit!).

The sound chips are quite good, so it'd be worth trying the output first. If you do fit a card, disable the on-board drivers and change the BIOS accordingly.

The ATI chipsets are described here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_700...rated_graphics

[Anteries]

Thanks guys, they are some lovely little motherboards that have been suggested. there is one thing I'd been wondering about though, and that is Phenom Athlon II 250 compatibility. and BIOS updating. I haven't decided which CPU to get, and I'm a little tempted by this new AMD CPU. the gigabyte website does not show the motherboard in the first post as being compatible. now I know it is because the new CPUs are backward compatible. But do you need to flash the BIOS first?

I don't know if the Asusof Foxconn are the same. but in other words, would you already need to have an old AM2 CPU to put into the new motherboard to flash the BIOS before you could use the your new AMD CPU? which would be difficult as I only have 754 socket processers.

In terms of computing power, I need something that sufficient for good speech recognition in a multiwindow environment. Using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. balanced off against a computer which is on all the time playing media and downloading overnight, even though it's a low power processor I'm sure something like a 4850e will be plenty powerful enough with all the new improvements in memory management and speed over my Athlon 64 3200+ 2.2ghz 754 socket processor. that said, I am seriously tempted to go over the top with one of these new chips.