Cost effective PC.

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3v0

Coop Build Coordinator
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If you are not into motherboards stop here.

I have started looking for a new MB/CPU combo. Would like built in lan and video. Plan to use existing non serial drives. I found these two board/processor combos on pricewatch. Both are $125 + ~$30 to mount the processor test and a fan upgrade.

The two factor I can think of is the quality of the board (do you trust em) and the Chipset. The Gigabyte board uses the GeForce 6100. The Biostar uses the VIA K8M800 Chipset.

Any suggestions. Others I should look at in this pricerange.

Gigabyte GA-M61SME-S2 X2 4200 M61SME-S2 Socket AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Chipset Dual Cha. DDR2 PCI Exp. 2 PCI IDE/2 SATA 8Cha Audio NVIDIA CineFX 3.0 VIDEO 10/100 LAN USB2.0 MATX W/CPU - AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ 2.4GHz Dual Core W/Heatsink & FAN ...

and

Biostar Athlon 64 X2 AM2 4200 K8M800MAM2 Socket AM2 VIA K8M800 Chipset Dual Cha DDR2 AGP8X 2 PCI 4 EIDE UDMA133/SATA RAID1 5.1Cha Audio VIA UniChrome Pro VIDEO 10/100 LAN USB2.0 MATX W/CPU -AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Socket AM2 CPU W/Heatsink & FAN ...

 
The Gigabyte GA-M61SME-S2 X2 has only one IDE socket which could be a problem for you. The Biostar K8M800MAM2 has 2 IDE sockets.

I am not saying that the Biostar is better - there are many other things to consider.
For example, what OS are you planning to use? - Vista does a rating of the multimedia capabilities of the hardware for determining how well games etc will run on it.
The onboard graphics may not score so well as a good graphics card for example.
 
Good points.

This box will never run VISTA or be used to play games. I may try to get a 2nd monitor running.

It will start life as my workstation but will spend most of its life as a local web server when it gets replaced in a year or two. The current webserver is 650 MHz so this will be an improvement.
 
Is still IDE HD available?
In overall the first board is leading.

The main different I see from these two boards is the first board supports upto DDR2 800
& supports PCI express with 8 channel audio

The second board can supports upto DDR2 667 with built in shared VGA 64mb with 5.1 audio & no PCI express.

If you forget the speed & graphics & also the brand & chipset names for a while the second board will meet your requirements.
 
A couple of points
- those boards will both do fine for a simple workstation.
- the reason they are cheap is they are being phased out
- the world is moving to SATA (vs IDE, also now called PATA)
- neither board supports DVI (for flat panel displays). VGA will be ok but it will limit your visual quality and what size display you can use. I LOVE my 1680x1050 widescreen monitor. having more display area has become a necessity to me now. it makes PCB design (among other things) sooo much easier.
- neither board can support dual monitors
- the NVidia 6100 is pretty old at this point and the drivers may not easily support larger resolutions (especially widescreen), depending on your OS. If you have an LCD display, you will definitely want to use native resolution.
- If forced to choose between the 2, I'd take the one with PCI express as that's the way expansion cards are going.
- Load it up with memory - at least 2 GB. That's the best way to get good performance.

On the monitor issue - flat panel displays have really fallen in price - 22" widescreens are now < $300. Don't scrimp on your eyes...

My cost effective workstation board would have 4-6 SATAs, PCI-e 16X and 1X, external dual DVI out video card, a couple of PCI legacy slots and room for 4 sticks of ddr2 ram. This will cost you a bit more but gives a lot more room for growth. I'd guess around 225 for that (including the video card).
 
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