Need suggestions on a motherboard for a budget box

R

RAA-Kr1cH

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 4, 2005
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I'm upgrading my wife's pc, and I need some input on motherboards. I'm a tech for one of the local IT companies, and I build probably 30-40 PCs a year. I order all the parts, and assemble the machines, and 99% of the time go with Intel boards. That's pretty much the only brand I'm very familiar with.

The Asus board on my wife's s478 board is going out, so I'm upgrading her system to a C2D. Probably the E6550 or E6750. I'll be adding a 7900GT, 2GB of memory and a single HDD, and single DVD burner. This is all going in to a Lian Li PC-A05 (absolutely gorgeous case btw, this is my first Lian-Li and I'm very jealous of her new case)

My first inclination is to just order the same board we use in most of the workstations we build, the DG31PR. They're currently $80 at the egg. I am very comfortable purchasing an Intel board because of their stability, and the excellent customer service we get from Intel. BUT I'm wondering if I could save some coin by going with a different manufacturer, perhaps Foxconn, Abit, Gigabyte or DFI. I'm not as familiar with the manufacturers though, so any advice given would be wonderful.

This machine will not be OC'd. Both the HDD and the DVD are pata, so sata support isn't necessary, although I'm sure in this day and age, it would be pretty hard to find a board without SATA. I would like it to have a gigabit nic, but other than that, I'm not really sure why I would want one manufacturer, or chipset over the other.

I don't necessarily want cheap, just less expensive. I don't mind spending the extra coin on an Intel board, but if I can save $20 and still get a good quality product, I'm all for it.

Thanks in advance for any help and recommendations.
 
If you were buying new drives, I'd recommend SATA, and at this rate I don't think you'd easily find a motherboard NOT supporting SATA.

As far as boards go, really don't know how much you'll save, especially if you're not looking into OCing, can probably even put in a ECS board if you wanna be cheap.

There's deals on the DS3L, but at $90 now it's not so hot, but sometimes drops to $60.

At which price you might find the Abit IP35-E which is another good low end board.

I'd steer clear of the older chipsets and try to get something relatively new, and why the E6550? Wouldn't it be better to get different? Maybe in the E2xxx series? Cost wise, at least.

If you really look to save some cash with a low end build, check out the trade section, good stuff often brand new goes for really cheap.

Good luck.
 
I'll have to check out the e2 series real quick, I picked the e6 series for the 1333mhz fsb.
 
For the 170.00 that you will be paying for the E6650, I would rather get the E4700, 2.6ghz and 45nm. If you can use OBV, you will have enough coin to get a sata hd.
E4700 ~159.00
Asrock Wolfdale 1333-667 - 47.99
2gb micron 533 or 667 ~40.00
80gb hd sata -primary ~41.00




 
Couple quick things, I'm not finding any info on an e4700, and what does OBV stand for?
 
Ah ok no wonder I could find anything hehe. I don't really care about OBV because I'm upgrading an old system. She already has a 19" lcd and HDD, so those aren't the issue. I'm not trying to go cheap, I'm trying to keep the price down...


Does that make sense? I hope so, it does in my mind anyway. I don't want to go cheap just so save coin, but if I can find a quality part that's a little less expensive, than I don't mind going that route.

I do think I'm going to stick with the latest chipset though. So I guess I've narrowed it down to the G31.

Thanks for all the help so far, keep it coming!
 
I use Intel boards in my own machines when I am not going to be overclocking. They just work and that's what I like from my systems at home. (I want them to work.) Now in my gaming computers it is another story. I'll typically use an ASUS board most of the time. The ASUS boards have always been reliable for me, but occasionally there is a feature or two that don't work quite right or are a pain to make work in the first place but generally speaking they've served me very well over the years. My only real set back on that has been with the Striker Extreme.
 
I got that board for a co-worker and it works really good. The only thing that sucks about that board is that you can't run the ram at 1066. It sucks since I got my buddy 1066 ram too... maybe I should've got the G33 huh :). Maybe that would've helped.
 
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