Good, cheap board for 800Mhz T-bird

[sodcha0s]

The computer show is comming to town next month and while I'm there I'd like to pick up a decent board for the spare cpu in my drawer. Prefer VIA boards, and would like to spend $90 or less. Any suggestions?

 

[Peter]

Integrated-everything or not?

 

[sodcha0s]

Intergrated sound would be good, anything else wouldn't matter. I'm either going to use it to upgrade my kids computer or build a small server out of it, haven't decided for sure yet. I have spare vid cards, modems, sound cards, etc. laying around.

 

[Peter]

Well the usual suspect for low cost non-integrated is ECS K7S5A, takes SDRAM or DDR and any socket-A CPU. It comes in several flavors, with stereo or 4-channel sound, and with or w/o LAN.

If it's to be all-in-one, including VGA, 4-channel sound, LAN, and a modem card packaged, then PC-Chips M810L is your friend - or if you don't reuse SDRAM, then the new 841LU. Although it's a shared-memory VGA solution, it'll probably still be a lot better than old leftovers.

These are all SiS chipset boards btw. If you prever VIA chipset, then either go completely basic and use the older K7VZA v3 (KT133A chipset), this goes for around $50, or get the K7VTA3 v3.1 with the current KT333 chipset for around $80-90, depending on which version you get. There are baseline, w/ RAID, w/ RAID and USB 2.0.

regards, Peter

 

[sodcha0s]

Thanks for the input Peter, I will look into the boards you mentioned.

 

[Jace]

This board is really great:

MSI K7T Turbo2

 

[jacktesterson]

 

[jacktesterson]

The ECS K7VZA runs just awesome...it was supposingly a test board but it works so well I have used it....and yes, the best of the best cheap boards are the ECS K7VZA, ECS K7S5A and the MSI K7T Turbo 2......but the K7S5A is really fussy about cheaper power supplies...personally...best bang for ur buck is a K7VZA....old thunderbirds run to hot to o/c and its not worth it (this is what the K7T Turbo 2 is for).....so K7VZA is the best buy

 

[sodcha0s]

Thanks everyone for all the input. I've narrowed it down to the K7VZA and the K7T Turbo 2. My spare PS is a PC power and cooling 300w, so that shouldn't be an issue. I haven't tried OCing since my celery 300a.... BTW that machine is still running @464 for well over 2 years now....

 

[kidtriton]

I love the ECS K7SEM for cheap systems. It will work on any socket A and uses SDram. Has built in video , sound and lan. I like building "cardless" computers. It's $55 at newegg.

I just priced a duron 950, 128mb, k7sem, 20 gig hd, cd and floppy in a enlight case. $297 shipped for the complete system.