Opinions Invited on S478 Motherboard

[Behemoth]

I've got a small project on at the moment along these lines. I was given a PC the other day at work, it's only a Packard Bell, it's got 512 meg of DDR2 ram and a Celeron 3.33 GHz CPU the only thing it doesn't have is a hard drive.

Not quite sure what I'm going to do with it, but I'm ever so tempted to make it into a file server.

[scaryjim]

Not a bad idea with that kind of spec

I'd looked at the Biostar motherboard a few times before as a kind of interesting curiousity, never thinking I'd buy one. But then I ended up with the random bits I listed in the OP lying around as a result of various bundles / upgrades / random purchases, and it seemed like a good idea to do something with them

The mobo itself has had a redesign since the picture on Microdirect was taken - they've dropped that odd rather sickly green colourscheme in favour of a brighter, more lego-brick colour scheme with a blue PCB. Looks pretty good, actually The cooler I've bought is an interesting lowish profile side-blowing jobby, but the fins have all collapsed sideways slightly, so I'm going to have to remove the cover and straighten them out of ensure I get the best thermal performance - should be pretty good though once I've finished. I might pop up a build log when I get round to doing it.

The computer itself is going to end up mostly being used for "non-work" website design (i.e. the stuff I do freelance / as favours rather than 9 - 5 at my employer) - while my current Duron 700 / 512MB would do the job, the 1GB RAM will be better for vitualising a linux server while working within Windows. Of course, having the better spec also brings with it the possibility of doing some gaming, and potentially using it as a lan box. With luck I may be able to upgrade the Celly to a P4 HT 3.4GHz at some point in the not too distant future, too