Reliable compatible AM2 board?

[Insomniator]

I saw the 3500+ AM2 at hw rebuild for 70 bucks and if I can get a decent AM2 board for 70-100 I'll have a pretty good budget set up, but i've only used intel boards and cpus and havent had to worry much about compatibilty and such.

Dont care much about oc'ing but it would be nice.. I just wanna put the parts together and have them work.

Still cant decide between this for 150 or an e6300 setup for 300..


thanks!

 

[customcoms]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813136015

Make sure you have OCZ ram and a 480+ watt psu. Otherwise, look at an epox. This is the best AM2 mobo under $100 (and the price keeps going up b/c people have stumbled onto the secret lol). The best board is the DFI lanparty nVidia 590SLI AM2, but its $200 and not needed unless overclocking the S@!t out of your processor.

 

[Insomniator]

I have a 500 watt psu and Corsair value select DDR2 667... i know thats cheap memory but I havent heard of
too many problems with it..

that board looks pretty nice

 

[Insomniator]

I'm thinkin onboard video would be nice instead of rushing a 7600gs or somethin right now..

Any thoughts on the GIGABYTE GA-M55plus-S3G ?

 

[yyrkoon]

The board in my signature is good, IF you dont need alot of bells and wistles. It doesnt OC well, unless you drop the multiplier (atleast for my 3800+), in which case I was able to run a 250 MHZ HT. Had to drop my HTT link to 800, and memory speeds from DDR2 800 to DDR2 667, but it worked fine. The only real gripe I have with it, is that IF you're not used to Asrock or Asus boards, setting up a SATA drive as your main drive can be a bit of a PITA. Basicly, you'll haveto go into the BIOS, turn SATA operation mode to [RAID], enter into the RAID CMOS utility, select the drive as a spaning array (yes, even for one drive), and of course you'll either need a floppy, or a slipstreamed copy of windows XP with both the SATA, and RAID drivers. Allin all, however. its not a terrible board, even has integrated NV44 Graphics if you do not NEED all that fast of a graphics subsystem. The board cost me, a total of $54usd at newegg (which seems to be out of stock atm), but it wil definately hold me over for a few more months until I jump on the Conroe bandwagon