E2140/E2160 motherboard recommendations?

[Gigantopithecus]

Looking for a motherboard for a friend's budget build. Will be going with either the E2140 or E2160. The following are musts:

-Out of the box support (no bios flashing necessary)
-Onboard video

Overclockability would be nice, even a relatively modest oc is fine (though oc is not necessary). Really just looking for a solid, no frills, easy to work with board, as I want him to cut his teeth on building rigs on this one.

Thanks for your time!

 

[o1die]

Fry's has the 2180 with ecs board for $98.99 in this week's ad. It's a no frills sis chipset board with onboard video. Or checkout an asrock Conroe 1333 D667 board at newegg for about $59 shipped. Has an Intel chipset. I have 2 asrock and one ecs boards, and they all work fine.

 

[Gigantopithecus]

That Asrock board looks good. Any other suggestions?

 

[brencat]

*Post deleted*

 

[Bonesdad]

what is he doing with this computer?

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: o1die
Or checkout an asrock Conroe 1333 D667 board at newegg for about $59 shipped.

The Asrock boards are actually pretty good for the money. I have a slightly more expensive ConRoe1333DVI-H, looks to be pretty much the same except I paid around $80 for mine (comes with a PCI-E DVI card) since either the cheaper one wasn't available yet, or I didn't know about it. It isn't an overclocking monster, but can probably push your CPU to the limits of what it can do without additional Vcore. One problem though is lack of a 1:1 memory multiplier for 800MHz FSB CPUs. For that, plus much better overclockability, I've heard the Gigabyte G33 chipset boards have a new BIOS out that enables 1:1 memory multiplier. Those boards start at $100. The onboard video of the G33 is supposedly better, but is kind of built on the same core as the cheaper boards IIRC.

 

[Gigantopithecus]

Thanks for the input, everyone. Got the Asrock board yesterday & put together the system this morning. Modest OC of an E2140 to 1.92ghz on stock vcore was a piece of cake. Doubt he'll need more than that (doubt he'd even notice the difference, but hey, why not?).