Dad wants to upgrade... what's a good motherboard for him?

[Supermercado]

My dad has an old P3 733MHz system with an ASUS board, I think (we got our computers at the same time and I believe he got the same board as I did, the P3V4X). He told me the other day that he would like to upgrade his machine to a P4 2.4 or so system and asked me what would be a good motherboard for him to get. I upgraded my system to a P4 2.4c with Abit IC7 this past summer so I know a little bit about what's available but after I bought my new hardware, I've pretty much fallen out of the loop on what's good and what's not.

His computer is pretty much a typical family system, used mostly for email, web browsing, and minimal gaming (mostly just my brother's Tiger Woods 2003, I think, and my sister's Harry Potter games - nothing extremely demanding from what I can tell), so he doesn't need something even as close to high-end as my IC7. He wants to do his upgrade as cheaply as possible and I don't think he wants to spend more than $100 on the board. Something in the range of $80 or so that can support the 800MHz FSB P4's would be ideal. He's not interested in AMD at all. He's doing the upgrade with the idea of being able to upgrade an older system that's upstairs in my bedroom when I'm away at school that my brother and sister can use for AIM, etc. I think he'd like to take his old TNT2 video card (I think that's what it is) and SBLive out of his machine and put them in the computer upstairs, so I think he's looking to get onboard video and sound for his machine. I know onboard sound is probably going to be good enough for him but are there any cheap P4 boards that have decent-enough onboard video for the light gaming that it would be used for?

Any suggestions? Thank you.

 

[Peter]

Be aware that you're for sure going to need a new case and PSU anyhow. Given that you can't use the old RAM and probably don't want to use the old hard disk and graphics card, just go buy or build an entirely new system.

Pentium 4 relies on having really fast RAM for good performance - integrated video is going to stink quite impressively. Rather much unlike an AMD system, where the CPU's caching strategies are much better and RAM speed doesn't matter as much.
However there is one inexpensive Elitegroup board that has onboard graphics with dedicated RAM. The board comes in P4 and Athlon flavors - you choose, P4S8AG or K7S7AG.