Need MB w/ good onboard video

[jraddatz]

Can someone offer some advice on a motherboard that will support an Athlon 64 (when I buy one after april 9th due to the price drops), that has onboard video that can handle some current games? I'll be updgrading later for newer games, but I want a motherboard that can play WoW, BF2, FEAR, etc. out of the board. And I don't need settings at max, but that would be nice. I'll be putting a 3800 or so in it, and will put 2GB of ram. I want a solid motherboard, but O/C is not necessary, since I have not done that since my Celereon 333. Thanks!

 

[Heidfirst]

best onboard gfx at the moment is probably the AMD690 chipset but nVidia have the MCP68 chipset family about ready to roll into the market.
Anandtech have an mATX review (over)due any day now.

 

[jraddatz]

I tried searching newegg.com for AMD690 and nothing came up. How can I browse these boards? and what is a good brand these days?

It's been a while for me.

 

[bradul]

jraddatz, check out this amd page, http://www.amdcompare.com/us-en/extension/MotherboardFilter.aspx, just select chipset 690G. The same is true for a newegg.com search, use 690G. Zipzoomfly.com has several boards listed but most are pre-order. The nvidia integrated options coming out are the GeForce 7050-630A, which adds shader model 3.0, that I believe the 609G does not do. I could not find an Nvidia page like the amdcompare one, but a couple of boards are the Biostar TF7050-M2 and the Epox EP-AP68P/G.

 

[BladeVenom]

Use their advanced search. ASUS M2A-VM 690G, MSI K9AGM2-L 690V

Anandtech's benchmarks.

 

[jraddatz]

Thank you very much for the info!

 

[jraddatz]

Wow, those benchmarks are pretty bad... Maybe I'll be buying a video card with it instead... 15FPS for BF2 on medium? I get better FPS with a Athlon 1800, 512MB of ram, and a radeon 9500pro.

Why so bad?

 

[mercanucaribe]

Because it's onboard video!

 

[jraddatz]

looks like im headed to the video card section for a cheap fill-in video card to hold me over 3 months