Msi gf615m-p33

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

This seems to be the cheapest AM3 motherboard out there:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/177224

Here are the specifications for the motherboard:

http://www.msi.com/index.php?func=pr...=&prod_no=1815

Edit!!

The HT does not seem to run at full speed!!

[kmac]

By HT do you mean the Hyper Transport Bus? If so what is it and what are the implications of it not running at "full speed"?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

By HT do you mean the Hyper Transport Bus? If so what is it and what are the implications of it not running at "full speed"?

Yes,HT mean Hyper Transport Bus and running it slower means decreased performance for the processor. However if you are only building a computer for web browsing,word processing and internet usage it should not be such a big issue.

[scaryjim]

I've looked at that before, but given the chipset is at about 4 years old (I believe it was originally a socket 939 chipset!) I really don't think it's that good a buy. I mean, seriously, GeForce 6 graphics?!?

Of course, that's the main reason it doesn't support HT3.0 - the chipset is far too old. I guess it would make some kind of sense with a Sempron 140 and 1GB of the cheapest DDR3 available as a basic office machine / web browsing machine, but frankly it's almost exactly the same motherboard I was using (in significant numbers) for office machines back in early 2006 and you'd kind of hope technology would move forward rather than backwards! I wonder why we don't have 740G / 760G AM3 motherboards available yet...?

EDIT: Aparently ASUS do have a 760G AM3 mobo - but it's more expensive than MSI's cheapest 785G board!

[kmac]

Okay Thanks CAT, already built an i5 based machine but those AMD chips are so cheap that I was tempted to upgrade my 1.4Ghz Athlon Thunderbird