Which AM2+ Micro ATX Mobo?.

[jon bda]

Hey guys, after a mobo for the kids new build. Needs to take a Phenom II 940, PCI-E gfx obviously and be matx. Any recommendations?.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Unless you have already bought the Phenom II X4 940 and some DDR2 it would around the same price to get an AM3 Phenom II X4,some DDR3 RAM and an AM3 motherboard.

I would look at the following motherboards:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Asus-M4A785D-M-PRO

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

[scaryjim]

I'm going to assume you have the processor and ram already and answer your actual question
The real question is budget: The obvious chipset choices are 785G and 790GX, so I'd recommend one of these:

MSI 785GTM-E45 (785G, £48.42)
ASUS M4A785D-M PRO (785G, £57.47) *disclaimer: I am a bit of an ASUS fanboi
Biostar TA790GX-XE (790GX, £70.37)
DFI Lanparty Jr 790GX-M2RS (790GX crossfire capable, £112.11) - yes, it has 2 PCIe x16 slots

[Pob255]

How about the AMD 760g chipset? while the onboard graphics are not as good, jon bda mentioned pci-e so I take it he's putting a graphics card in there.
Look for one with a 710southbridge for better overclocking and better hard drive controller (over the 690sb or 700sb)

Then again the price of that msi 785g motherboard it's cheaper than most of the 760g boards

[jon bda]

Thanks for the input people!. I'll have to ignore the DFI as i'm looking at it and getting silly ideas forming in my head , that MSI board does look good for the price i have to say. Was also thinking of maybe windowing their case at some point so that all-black colouring of it would look pretty good i reckon...

[scaryjim]

The Crossfire DFI Lanparty has given me a *lot* of silly ideas over the last year - fortunately I've never been in the financial position to act on them

I wasn't going to put the MSI board in my original post (being an ASUS fanboi) but it's such good value it's hard to overlook.

As Pob says though, the 760G chipset is very similar in terms of its featureset, should come with the SB710 (that's the AMD mandated combination), and can be picked up a little cheaper - this ASRock @ £41.57 is probably as cheap as you can get, but this ASUS @ £43.59 looks a good buy too, if you'll be using discreet graphics...