Good, highly rated AMD based Micro ATX board

danball1976danball1976 Wichita Falls, TX
edited December 2006 in Hardware
I need a little help here determining a good micro ATX motherboard to go into a budget system for my brother that I might build if he thinks it isn't too expensive.

It has to be AMD based, but not sure if I should go socket 754, 939 or AM2.

Onboard video is acceptable if I can get away with it and it can play games well.

Oh, and it would be a good idea if it has the metal canister solid silicon capacitors around the CPU.

Comments

  • csimoncsimon Acadiana Icrontian
    edited December 2006
    What's the primary usage of this pc dan? Will you/he be overclocking it?
  • danball1976danball1976 Wichita Falls, TX
    edited December 2006
    No overclocking, mostly internet usage, some game playing. Anything better than the Dell Inspiron 1150 laptop that he uses now.

    I was looking at the EPoX EP-MGF6100-M as a good board, but it would be nice if I could find one with the superior metal canister solid silicon capacitors like the higher end EPoX boards have (EP-MF570 SLI and EP-MF590 SLI for example have them).

    I was looking at Biostar boards, as the BIOSTAR TForce 6100 has the silicon capacitors (4 of them), but recent NewEgg user reviews suggest quality has gone down in the past couple of months.
  • miragemirage
    edited December 2006
    danball1976 wrote:
    No overclocking, mostly internet usage, some game playing. Anything better than the Dell Inspiron 1150 laptop that he uses now.

    I was looking at the EPoX EP-MGF6100-M as a good board, but it would be nice if I could find one with the superior metal canister solid silicon capacitors like the higher end EPoX boards have (EP-MF570 SLI and EP-MF590 SLI for example have them).

    I was looking at Biostar boards, as the BIOSTAR TForce 6100 has the silicon capacitors (4 of them), but recent NewEgg user reviews suggest quality has gone down in the past couple of months.

    You might also want to check out this Foxconn 6150K8MA-8EKRS Socket 939 NVIDIA GeForce 6150. I have also been looking for a MATX Socket 939 mobo and I have reduced the list to two boards, the other board is what you already know, Biostar TForce. I am interested to hear about your perspective, can you please post your decision here? Good luck !
  • danball1976danball1976 Wichita Falls, TX
    edited December 2006
    I already looked at that, the 5 egg rating of 57% isn't high enough for me to consider it (must be at least a 5 egg rating of 70%).

    What about the ABIT NF-M2 nView, it has a 5 egg rating of 74% and 88% the last two weeks. With the exception of one user rating is 3 because it has no parallel or serial ports or headers on the board, it has a very high combine 5 and 4 egg rating of 85%. Of 38 reviews, only 4 or 5 were DOA.

    I've narrowed down my choices to the following AM2 boards:
    Abit NF-M2 nView - has passive heatpipe chipset cooling and DVI port, 4 SATA II ports, up to 8GB of DDR2, ieee1394a
    EPoX EP-MGF6100-M - has 2 PATA ports for 4 PATA drives, but 2 SATA II ports, up to 16GB of DDR2, no ieee1394
    Gigabyte GA-M61PM-S2 - has 4 SATA II ports, up to 16GB of DDR2, ieee1394a
  • nonstop301nonstop301 51° 27' 24.87" N // 0° 11' 38.91" W Member
    edited December 2006
    Those are good boards danball. I recently got a socket AM2 μATX from ASUS but the ones you have picked are just as good if not better :)

    One thing I would just want to add is that you should be careful on the choice of μATX case as well because you might find that some don't meet the specifications of your board or will limit the use of all the added features the board has to offer.
  • danball1976danball1976 Wichita Falls, TX
    edited December 2006
    The only thing about Abit is that they seem to have great MicroATX boards, based on the review of that one, but their regular ATX boards aren't fairing too well, with the exception of the Fatal1ty AN9 32X, it has a combined 4 and 5 egg rating of 73%.

    I'm waiting for Abit to become as good as they were before the mess with the class action suit regarding the defective capacitors (not Abit's fault, but brought on because they were the only company to admit they had problems with capacitors), and I understand that before Universal Technologies bought them, they were near bankruptcy at the beginning of this year.
  • csimoncsimon Acadiana Icrontian
    edited December 2006
    If for anything else ...I would have to recommend the ASUS for the onboard soundmax quality.
  • Datsun-1600Datsun-1600 Sydney.au
    edited December 2006
    Have been waiting for the Abit NF-M2 nView to become available downunder, but still waiting. I am an Abit fan from way back, currently running 6 Abit mobos. The only complaint I have is the slow release of them.

    Datsun 1600
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