Motherboard Ideas?
Posted by John-Erik | Filed under Uncategorized
Okay, here are my requirements for a motherboard for a particular application:
- Socket 478
- Intel 845 chipset
- no onboard LAN
- no onboard sound
- AGP slot
- ATX or microATX (3 PCI slots needed)
- $50-ish
Any ideas?
I’m trying to build a HTPC for my mother’s christmas present (possibly to tie-in with a new HDTV from my dad), and have picked out a case, and have some parts from a new dead system that I’d like to use to keep the costs down: Celeron 1.8, 256 MB of PC2100, a disk drive, an Intel PRO/1000MT NIC, a Crucial 9600SE and an Audigy 2 (and a DVD drive, but that’s trivial), plus I’ll be purchasing a tuner card.
Any ideas at all? If it’s MicroATX then the price could actually be a bit higher since the case is correspondingly cheaper (by about $50), but I’d perfer the full ATX if possible and I don’t want onboard devices for a myriad of reasons (like they suck).
Sound is OK if it’s 5.1 and onboard LAN is OK if it’s Intel PRO/1000 (gigabit).
i845 is needed because it’s single channel DDR - basically, I could go i865 or some such but it costs more as I’d need to buy memory (two matching DIMMs). Plus, it has to be 100% reliable, so SiS, Via, et cetera are all out, leading me to Intel only. Heck, even an i850E would be OK if I could get some cheap RDRAM. Memory bandwidith isn’t that important (I mean, I’m going to be using a 1.8 Celeron) but reliability is key, and I have DDR memory.
