October buyers' guide to motherboards in the US

LAST TIME the InQ had a guide about choosing motherboards, it was just over one year ago back in September 2003. Over the time, not much has changed today though except for the prevelance of s754 and s775 sockets. For sake of clarity, we will restrict ourselves to socket A, socket 754 (no 939 or 940), socket 478 and socket 775. There will be a short mention for socket 603 for what I personally believe to be a genuinely prized product. Winners should bear several features - they should be affordable, stable and available.

Also today's winners will be for the USA rather than for the rest of the world. More to come in the following days.

In the socket A category, there can only be one winner. If you want a new product then you cannot really go wrong with the $50 Biostar M7NCD Pro board featuring the acclaimed nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset. It comes with five PCI slots and an AGP one as well as a three DIMM sockets, Realtek 6-channel codec, Realtek Ethernet Controller as well as six USB 2.0 slot and that's all. Do not expect anything else! You will have to buy your own Firewire or SATA card if you want to. The latest downloads for this board are available here.

Some goodies included in the software package include Watchdog, Flasher, Winflash, 9th Touch and Warpspeeder. All these utilities concern the BIOS itself. Overclocking the board is eased by the array of options available. AGP Frequency, CAS Latency, VCore, DRAM Voltage, FSB etc. On Newegg where it is sold, more than 300 purchasers gave it on average eight out of ten.

The favourite trick was to put it in tandem with one of those 35W mobile AMD Athlon XP 2400+ and overclock that baby like crazy. Someone even managed a 11x200 O'C. Not bad at all. Lastly, you will also get a free Newegg Logo Watch Gray Color with your purchase.

In the Socket 754 category, we have a surprising winner. The Chaintech SK8T800 is the cheapest new board available at newegg - again. At only $61, it is a stripped down motherboard with bare essentials - as we like them. You get the K8T800 chipset powering the whole thing, two DIMM sockets, the AGP and five PCI slots as well as Cmedia 6-channel audio and eight USB 2.0 ports and VIA's Ethernet solution. Interestingly you also have support for SATA RAID 0/1, unseen at this price bracket. Apart from that though, there's nothing else to watch for.

If you're into overclocking, then this won't probably be your card. Although the clean layout would probably allow for some fairly alrge HSF, the lack of BIOS OC friendly settings like Voltage adjustment and other such things. However, we do also know that the Athlon 64 is far from being a very overclock friendly board. So that might not mean a great lost. The newest BIOS version will probably reveal some interesting features, we've read somewhere. And before I forget, you also get a free gift with that. Bottom line is that you get a cheap no-frill board, performing like a charm with some nice tricks.

Jumping to the socket 478, Abit via Compbus comes to us with the VI7 motherboard which has a Via PT800 chipset. The latter has two DIMM sockets and one AGP port. The board supports the latest Intel technology - DDR400, Hyperthreading and 800MHZ FSB. Storage wise, you have two SATA 150 ports supporting RAID of course plus the traditional Ultra ATA connectors. Six USB 2.0 ports, one LAN Ethernet port and the usual classic ports complete the set of IOs. The layout of the board is quite different from what we may have already seen. The board is much longer than it is wide and this may please some who have had their optical drives blocked by their boards. The sound department is handled by a 5.1 sound module which happen to be SPDIF enabled. Oh, and finally, you will also get ABIT engineered software package - Softmenu, Tweakguard, Thermal Guard, Fan Secure and Flash menu. The price of the motherboard, a surprisingly low $56.95.

Over at gameeve, we tracked a peculiar beast. The Asus P5P800 comes with the Intel 865PE chipset. It might be the lowest priced non integrated graphics LGA775 at $101 but guess what, it is the motherboard used to achieve the world overclocking record of 6GHz achieved two weeks ago. The chipset still rates amongst one of the best.

You still get the same specs as with most motherboards - five PCI slots, one AGP, four DIMM sockets, eight USB 2.0 and one Gigabit LAN controller from Marvel. Also in the pack is a six-channel integrated CODEC audio sensing technology supporting SPDIF. Storage is managed by the ICH5 south brige and comprises of two Ultra ATA ports and two Serial ATA ports. No RAID here. The overclocking features of the card are petty impressive with Stepless frequencly selection up to 400MHz (1600MHz quad pumped), adjustable FSB/DDR ratio, Fixed AGP/PCI frequencies, CPU, Memory and AGP voltage adjustable. µ