Integrated graphics boards - Are any of them decent?

[Farmall]

I have never used one before and am looking to build a comp for my bro who has a somewhat limited budget. His kids play games but nothing to intensive. He would like to stay under $500 including windows xp, so that leaves about $400 for parts.

Are any of them any good or should I not bother and go with the norm.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

 

[SpeedTester]

I've installed many Asus A7N266-VM AA motherboard for custumers at my store and
I'm very impressed with them. They feature onboard 5.1 sound, Onboard geforce 2 Video
and Onboard Lan. Newegg sells these for about 71 bucks with free fedex shipping.
This board also has 3 PCI and a AGP so in the feature you can always throw in a better
video card.

 

[Pjotr]

The absolutly best integrated solution is nForce2 based motherboards. Get basically any board you like, ASUS, ABit, Epox etc. They are not out just yet, but should show up this month. (IGP version, SPP version lacks the graphics)

They come in two flavours also, MCP and MCP-T, the T version has extras like dual LAN, Firewire and 5.1 audio, the non-T version still has regular audio and 1 LAN port. The boards are AMD only, so you can easily make a good $500 system.

 

[Farmall]

I will take a look at the ASUS board. Any thoughts on potential $$ of the nForce2 boards.

Thanks

 

[bdaley98]

If that's all he plays, he should be OK with just about anything. One word of advice, make sure whatever MOBO you get has an AGP slot in addition to the integrated video so that you can upgrade the video in the future.