If the CPU is the brain of your PC, then the motherboard is the body, and everyone wants the best body they can get. However, when you spend less than $l20, you aren’t going to get the best features. On the other hand, you don’t want to go for a $30 board, which will hamper your CPU and graphics card. The $70 mark seems to be a good starting point. As you may have noticed, while Intel tends to keep one socket for some time, AMD changes sockets more often than Jacob Zuma appears in court. So, we want something with a little future proofing, which leaves us with the AM2+ socket. There are a couple of decent boards that fit the bill, the Asus M2N- MX SE Plus and the Abit A-N68SV both at $70.
They are both well priced canvas welding machine, and should you suddenly find a roll of $100 notes stuffed down the back of the sofa, will take the latest AMD Phenom CPUs. Okay, you don’t get SLI, and the chipsets may lack some of the top-end features, but it’s what’s supported that counts.
Out of the two boards, the Abit A-N68SV has the better chipset and is the one we decided to use. The AM2+ socket enables us to use both the older AM2 and newer AM2+ chips. The mobo chipset is the nForce 630a, which while not the latest generation, is more than sufficient It supports dual-channel memory (533/667800MHz), 3GB SATA II including RAID 0,1 and 5 and has onboard, 5.1 HD surround sound. As a micro-ATX board, there’s only one PCI-e slot for graphics, but there are two PC I slots for any other cards you may want to add. The board does have integrated DirectX 9 graphics, courtesy of the GeForce 7025 chipset, but that’s easy enough to turn off in the BIOS. With four USB ports on the back plate, and the option to connect six more, you’re not short of connectivity either
If there’s one thing that’ll start a punch-up, it’s a debate about which brand of graphics card is best. Over the years the balance has swung from one to the other, sometimes NVIDIA has the best cards, sometimes it’s ATI (now AMD). Just like Intel and AMD, both companies had a product that does the basic job, the real difference tends to be in performance or features at a certain price point. Having said that, NVIDIA has been giving ATI a bit of a kicking in the last few years, and has carpet bombed the market with a vast array of models, from cheap integrated graphics to wallet-busting, discrete power-houses. If we look at the budget-end of the range, then NVIDIA has more to offer.
As a general rule of thumb, better tends to be more expensive, but you can get a surprisingly good card without breaking the bank. One of the best cards for your money is, of course, the 8800GT, but at $250 this is way beyond our budget. Reducing our expectations a little, we find the 8400GS is an extremely pleasing $50. Now while it’s true that this is a DX10 capable card, let’s be a little realistic here. At one sixth the price of the 8800GT, you sure ain’t going to be playing Crysis on a 24-inch widescreen monitor, with all the effects turned on. Then again, that’s a struggle for some SLI setups. However, it should be able to run a reasonable resoultion of 1024×768, without too many hiccups.
Spend a few dollars more, and you have the choice of the 8500GT at around $80, or if you really want to splash out, there’s the 8600GT for $l00. At each level you will get better performance, but you need to keep your expectations in check.
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