Hi,

Moderate priced MB, leaves a lot of room for debate.  Is a $40 dollar
board out of the question.  Does a $100 board work that much better?
Will A $150 board give you anything more than bragging rights?

I have been doing a lot of upgrades lately with ASRock boards.  They are
an off shoot of ASUS orgininally, and we sell a lot of them.

The one I like, the model p4i65gv is a mid priced board, $60-80 that
uses the intel 865 chipset and has VAL on board, an 8x agp, as well as
SATA, and can handle the new prescott core S478 cpu's.  This coupled
with a new Celeron "D" processor with 256 cache should give years of
servicabilty and performance at an attractive price.   Put the memory in
as pairs to achive Dual channel performance.

If the Intel Graphics doesn't do what they want it to you can always opt
for an AGP card later.  Try first, buy second.

Sata is real easy to set up.  No real issues to worry about.  The trick
is not have any ide hard drives attached till after the SATA is fully
installed.


Thanks and have a Great Day!

Joe Lore

=====================================

I'm thinking about building a computer for my son's family for
Christmas.  They currently have an old HP running W98SE so anything I
build will be a major advance.  A year ago I built an ASUS
P4P800-deluxe MB, 2.8HT, ATI 9500 Pro, 1 GB 3200 DDR, with a 120 GB WD
drive for myself and have been relatively happy with the results.  I say
relatively because recently I've been having some problems with the
monitor going black.  But that's another issue.

I'd like to stick with Intel and they will mostly be using the computer
for Surfing, chatting and home work.  Some gaming but not state of the
art gaming.  My questions:

As we go into 2005 what is the best all round moderately priced MB right
now?

Is a $100 video card still better than onboard video?

How difficult is it to set up SATA?  I see the prices have come down a
lot compared to summer of 2003.

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