ECS A55 FM2 micro-ATX motherboard $26 + $3 ship @ Newegg

[VirtualLarry]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...51&ignorebbr=1

Only three eggs, some DOAs, but one guy said he bought 30, and used them with A4-6300 Richland CPUs, and had no problems with any of them.

At this price, the mobo is practically disposable. It's not all solid caps, but the CPU VRMs are solid caps.

What can I say? It's an ECS board, which is usually a roll of the dice whether or not it's a good one or not.

You could pair this with the aforementioned A4-6300 dual-core 65W Richland APU for an additional $49.99.

Edit: Btw, YES, it does have HDMI. It would make a nice cheap little HTPC board.

 

[richierich1212]

A4-6300 is currently $35.79 + shipping/tax from NCIXUS.

 

[cbn]

Here is some competition for the A4-6300:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HCM8QQE/...xtension-kb-20 (Celeron G1820, $42.99 with free shipping)

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FXOTSEW/...xtension-kb-20 (ECS H81H3-M4, $39.99, free shipping)

A4-6300 (Richland Dual core @ 3.7 GHz base clock with 3.9 GHz turbo. 128 VLIW4 stream processors @ 760 MHz)

vs.

Celeron G1820? (Haswell Dual core @ 2.7 GHz. Intel HD graphics (10 EUs) @ 350 MHz base clock with 1.05 GHz max frequency)

How do they stack up?

 

[cbn]

Some passmark scores:

A4-6300 : 2181 CPU Marks

Celeron G1820 : 2753 CPU Marks

.....and just for comparison sake:

Celeron 1037U : 1778 CPU Marks

So going by Passmark, the A4-6300 is somewhere between an Ivy Bridge Celeron 1037U and Haswell G1820.

As far as iGPU goes? I would guess the A4-6300 is better, but I don't know by how much? (Are there any benchmarks that almost purely isolate the GPU without involving the CPU?)

 

[skillyho]

Picked one up to make a cheap HTPC, thanks for posting the deal. Hopefully I get a solid unit.

 

[DesiPower]

I have 2 ECS boards, both 1155, bought for around $25, both run pretty well, one is more than 2 years old. For that price I never expected them to last this long and work this good.

 

[Samus]

I have 2 ECS boards, both 1155, bought for around $25, both run pretty well, one is more than 2 years old. For that price I never expected them to last this long and work this good.

I've had good luck with ECS boards too. They usually follow the chipset reference design pretty closely so they're not adventurous boards (a good thing.) They also occasionally update the BIOSes, particularly when new CPU's are released or for microcode fixes.

I've had an ECS H61 Sandy Bridge board in my HTPC since 2011 running 24/7 (it seeds torrents in its "off" time)