Cheap motherboard

[Tringa]

My son wants to build a PC, but he hasn't got a lot to spend, so getting the latest technology is out.

Saw this motherboard - Asus A8V-VM-SE, which is cheap,(about £30) but I can't find any reviews of it. Any one know anything about this one?

He wants to build a PC mainly for the experience, for general use and a bit of gaming - not the latestest ones.

TIA

[Leepox]

what is his specific budget??? if that ok to ask

[Smudger]

I've got the vanilla A8V - it's an ok board. Solid and reliable with SATA and all that.

I think that the VM-Se is a micro-ATX with PCI-E.

So not many PCI expansion ports, but good graphics support.

Try here:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=434319

*edit* It's got the VIA chipset, where some people prefer the nVidia nForce one

[kalniel]

Actually I'd recommend something like the ASRock dual sata 2 - 939 socket chips should be fairly cheap, especially second hand single core models. The board has a lot of slots so you can go with a cheap AGP graphics card for now, and he can practise upgrading to a PCI-E card later down the line. It's got IDE connectors, sata 1 and 2 connectors, can do raid etc. etc. Basically it's got lots of options which could be great to learn from.

[Tringa]

Not sure about his budget, Leepox, other than as cheap as possible. Thanks for the replies all.

[DanceswithUnix]

I would have to say go for the AM2 socket, and pay another tenner for an NVidia chipset. No integrated graphics are good, but the NVidia one will at least run some games.

Like that one.

Also gives a choice of very cheap sempron, or slightly more costly Athlon64 single core, and either way there will be an upgrade path for the future.