Cheap Sockert A Mobo Recommendation

[Rockhound1]

I have a friend who is currently using a computer based on a 200 MHz pentium running Win95. He uses it for doing office type work (i.e., word documents, excel spreadsheets, e-mail, and surfing the Web). Recently, his IE developed a problem and he is no longer able to connect to the Internet. I thought it might be a good opportunity to bring his computing experience up a few notches and get rid of some of the old parts that I have lying around not being used.

Here is a quick inventory of the parts that I have:
Antec case
Antec 300 Watt PSU
AMD Duron 1800
Cooler Master CPU cooler
256 MB PC2100 RAM
Optical drives
Floppy drive

Here is what I need to complete his system:
Motherboard
Hard drive

For the motherboard, I am looking for something cheap with integrated video. My friend has no interest in playing games on his computer (he has a console for that). I have identified the following two micro-ATX motherboards as possibilities:

ECS 741GX-M
Biostar M7VIG 400

Does anyone here have any experience with these motherboards? Which would you recommend? Both of these boards have an AGP 4x/8x expansion slot in case he wants to upgrade the graphics in the future. I know this computer is not much by today's standards, but it will be a big improvement over what he is currently running.

Thanks.

 

[Peter]

Both the integrated graphics units are about equally outdated DirectX 7 hardware. I'd prefer the VIA graphics unit for its slightly better 2D media capabilities and somewhat more consistent driver quality - although there's not really anything wrong with the current state of affairs at SiS either.

Board vendor wise, I'd prefer ECS.

 

[GalvanizedYankee]

I'd like to add, if the PSU has been in service for awhile, open it, inspect the capacitors and replace the fan with a same wattage ball bearing unit.


...Galvanized

 

[Rockhound1]

Originally posted by: GalvanizedYankee
I'd like to add, if the PSU has been in service for awhile, open it, inspect the capacitors and replace the fan with a same wattage ball bearing unit.


...Galvanized

The 300 Watt PSU has never been used. It originally came with the Antec case, but was removed in favor of a more robust PSU. Now that the case is no longer needed, I put the 300 Watt PSU back.

Thanks.

 

[Rockhound1]

Originally posted by: Peter
Both the integrated graphics units are about equally outdated DirectX 7 hardware. I'd prefer the VIA graphics unit for its slightly better 2D media capabilities and somewhat more consistent driver quality - although there's not really anything wrong with the current state of affairs at SiS either.

Board vendor wise, I'd prefer ECS.

I was leaning toward the ECS motherboard. It appears to have a slightly better raputation than Biostar. I personnally have mixed results with ECS (one good and one bad), but I am willing to give them another try.

 

[cmrmrc]

im using the ECS 741GX-M and i have to say its not that bad actually. Of course, performance wise, it is way far behing my old broken ASUS A7N8X-LA on nforce2. The performance drop is just because of the SIS 741 chipset which isnt a very powerful one.

I'd say SIS 741=0.67nforce 2

But for general usage, the ECS 741GX-M is fine.