motherboard selection help

[babylou]

I have a Intel 1.7ghz processor with fan/heatsinc. I'm looking at building up a new pc and want to find out a rather inexpensive MB but reliable. Looking to spend under $100 if possible. I have seen some and have used ECS boards in the past.. any help greatly appreciated.

[NooNoo]

The processor you have, is it the 423 or the 478 pin 1.7? This makes a huge difference in what boards you can have. As a general rule stay away from ECS and from PC Chips if you budget is $100 go Asus, MSI. Gigabyte, Epox anything but the ecs/pcchips clones!!

[jitBob]

Originally posted by NooNoo
The processor you have, is it the 423 or the 478 pin 1.7? This makes a huge difference in what boards you can have. As a general rule stay away from ECS and from PC Chips if you budget is $100 go Asus, MSI. Gigabyte, Epox anything but the ecs/pcchips clones!!

Not religious but, Amen.

[Kineda]

Also are you looking for everythign to be integrated? or not? and what kind of memory are you looking to run?

[PeLiGrOsO]

Asus all the way.. biggest mistake i have ever made was buying a PC CHIPS motherboard.. hell no, what a piece of sh!t... now i got a bad *** asus A7N8X and kicks major a$$

[babylou]

it is the 478 i think... will check...
memory DDR 2100 or better.. I would like it to integrate the LAN.. but for playing games over a cable internet, is it better to have it integrated or use an higher end card in a PCI slot??

[Radical Dreamer]

A card generally does better if you are playing games, as many of the "better" cards tend to use less cpu cycles

[confus-ed]

Originally posted by Radical Dreamer
A card generally does better if you are playing games, as many of the "better" cards tend to use less cpu cycles

This is true ... but not !

Network cards do indeed 'munch' CPU time, but that depends more on how they are attached, than whether they are 'better' ... the usual problem with on board lan cards, is that not only are they 'less better' than an independant card, but also they are physically wired via the ISA bus rather than the PCI bus.

The ISA bus is often 'full up' or nearly dealing with the traffic generated by a lan, and the cpu overhead associated with anything on the ISA bus is about 4 times that of anything on the pci bus because of how it works ....

So I'll qualify Rad's basically sound advice & say a PCI lan card beats the pants off an ISA based lan card in 'performance' terms ... Neither will deliver data any faster than an equivalent 'rated' one, but a pci one will 'tax' your cpu less, thus being 'ready' to receive or send again 'quicker' ....so if the cpu is 'remotely' busy, the pci one will perform better regardless ...

But given the costs involved, a pci network card is $10 ? or therabouts, and the difference between an on board lan & not is cents, I'd 'lash that cash' !

[Froghead]

Check out rankings here.
http://www.motherboards.org/rank/Int...oard-rank.html

Not on the list but boards I could recommend are Asus P4S533 and GigaByte GA8SR533P.
Lot's of features for the price.

[Radical Dreamer]

Originally posted by confus-ed
This is true ... but not !


Neither will deliver data any faster than an equivalent 'rated' one,

Ok, I'll speed test my 3Com against any realtek or (insert other 'cheap' brand here) anytime you want.

The Lan performance of my 3com compared to a cheaper card is a difference of up to 5-8megaBYTES.

Also the cpu usage is lower when transferring files