Suggestions for a *CHEAP* motherboard for a Duron?

[Saem]

Recently I've been asked to come up with the a very low cost and good performing system. I didn't bother trying to explain that these two things are largely diametrically opposed and foolishly took on the challenge.

So, I figured the way to go is AMD, it's cheap and the Durons have some serious muscle for the price. Then I came to motherboards, which is where I'm stuck. I need to find a motherboard, which will hopefully have pc2100 support, if it doesn't pc133 is fine, it would be nice to have DDR, since in local shops it's only a $5 difference between the two memory types at 256MB. Any suggestions, if you know that motherboard has an possible problems, please include those so that I can work around them, I'm aiming for an ATI radeon, geforce MX or a Kyro as a video card.

 

[BenM]

The Gigabyte 7DX series should be fairly low cost by now, and from reports around the web, it's rock stable.

Other than that:
MSI K7N420
Shuttle AK31 rev3
ECS K7S5A - This one's a crapshoot. Some boards were great, some terrible
Gigabyte GA-7VTXE
SOLTEK SL-75DRV4
EPOX EP-8KHA+
MSI K7T266 PRO2-RU
Asus A7V266-E

All those boards I"ve heard good things about. The two MSI boards I've owned myself, and the Shuttle my friend owns. All 3 are very stable, but make sure the K7N420 has the latest BIOS.

 

[Saem]

All those boards I"ve heard good things about. The two MSI boards I've owned myself, and the Shuttle my friend owns. All 3 are very stable, but make sure the K7N420 has the latest BIOS.

Ah, this is good to hear. What OS do you run on those MSI boards, what video cards, sound cards and NICs are you running?

I'm going to be putting in a gf2mx and sb live 5.1 into the machine I'm coming up with. The gf2mx is for nVidia's OGL driver, the person I'm suggesting this machine to wants to learn OGL and will be running Win2K.

 

[MPI]

EPOX EP-8KHA+
MSI K7T266 PRO2-RU

I think it's appropriate to inform you that these two are the boards which had trouble with fitting long video cards, especially the GF4 4400/4600's(and some odd GF3Ti200's).

I know that with your budget that's pretty much of academical concern, but when you have so many other boards to choose from there's not much point in getting the ones that doesn't comply to the AGP2.0 standard...

 

[pascal]

Saem,
The MSI K7N420 is nforce and has a GF2MX, 5.1 DD audio and 10/100 NIC.

 

[BenM]

The K7N420 is using the built in NVIDIA NIC+Sound, and a Gainward GeForce3 Ti200.

The K7T266 Pro2-RU was using a GeForce3, Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, and an Intel Pro 100+ NIC.

As for my friend's Shuttle, I think he is using some generic NIC (possibly NetGear though), a SB Live!, and a VisionTek GeForce3.

 

[Saem]

Thanks for all the info. I realize that the nForce has integrated video, I'm just wary of it's performance. However, since it's all there (NIC, sound and GPU) I'm leaning more and more towards that.

 

[BenM]

The performance of the integrated video was OK for Serious Sam 2 at 800x600x32, if that's any help.

Forgot to add that I am/was using WindowsXP Pro on the K7N420, and Pro2-RU, but had Windows2000 for a brief time on the Pro2-RU.