Best Mobo/CPU combo for under $200 ??

[aircooled]

I'm going to pass down my ecsK7S5A /Athlon 1.33 to my kid and update mine. All I need is Mobo and CPU. With a $200 (or less) budget what do you recommend. I'm not worried about overclocking. Onboard NIC would be nice but not necessary (I have several cards). Onboard sound is also not necessary.

The parts I'm keeping include:
300w AMD/P4 power supply (cant remember the brand)
512 x 2 DDR PC2100 (Kingston)
Radeon 64DDR VIVO
Siig 133 ATA controller card (for my extra HD's)
3 x 30 gig 7200 rpm WD HD - 1 x 20 gig WD HD
Plextor 12x10x32
Pioneer 106s DVD ROM

Thanks!

 

[Vette73]

I would look at the Shuttle AK35GT2R. With this board you can get rid of the Siig 133 ATA controller card and put your 4 Hard Drives on the raid ports. This will leave the other 2 ports open for a CD-RW and/or DVD-Drive.

The board also have a 5.1 Ch sound card (C-Media) but no on-board ethernet.

The price of this board at newegg or Mwave should be under $99.

As for CPU you can get a Athlon XP1800+ for less than $100.

 

[aircooled]

Not bad.... Anyone have any comments/experience on the board?

 

[crapito]

Epox 8KHA+ (KT266a) motherboard with the fastest AMD socketA CPU you can get for a total of <$200. since you already have an ATA IDE card, you don't need the extra ports a RAID motherboard would have, and since you have other NICs, the lack of one won't matter either. it has crappy 2 channel audio, but as you'll probably want a separate (better) soundcard, that's irrelevant.

I've had 2 of the Epox 8KHA+ motherboards, and they absolutely rock in every way: stability, useful features (ie LED debug for checking if you burned out the CPU from too much/incorrect overclocking), and overclocking (200MHz FSB easily...).

my current Epox 4G4A+ is probably even better, as it has RAID, USB2.0, and a NIC built-in, but the CPU to get for it, a P4-1.6a costs about $135+, which makes you well over $200 total. this would be a better setup though, IMHO.