asrock 775dual-vsta

This is a great stable board for building a budget system. But, if you are planning to upgrade parts over time and build a "high" end system around this mainboard, I wouldn't recommend it. The bus speed is limited to 300MHz, so it will always be a poor overclocker, and I know for a fact the PCI-e x16 only runs at x8 speed.
Having said that, I did just build a system around this board for a customer with DDR1 and an AGP card, along with a P4 511, and it works excellent. Very cheap too.

I just upgraded from an Athlon XP-M 2500+ and Abit NF7-S 2.0 to the Asrock 775dual VSTA and a E6300. It's a good board, stable, and all the features you will actually use. It's a little light on the SATA end (only 2 ports), it's doesn't have a 1Gb ethernet port, rather a 100Mb (which is more then enough for most people, 100Mb = 12.5MB/s). The PCI-E slot is only 4x, so if you get a high end card (I'm gunna say 7800, 7900, x1800, x1900, 8600, 8800, x2800?, x2600?) The PCI-E slot will slow you down, but not enough to make it a big enough deal to get a new motherboard + ram right away.

It's a great stepping stone board, and the upgrade to a E6300 was HUGE. You wont regret it.

Its a good interim mobo as long as you have realistic expectations. Its definetly not an overclocker but if you can't aford to go all the way at once then it appears to be stable and works pretty much out of the box. I just did a partial upgrade using this board because I am waiting for videocard prices to drop and I have been very happy but I was ok essentially "wasting" the $60 on this board (actually, it'll probably end up been used for a cheap upgrade for my wife or on of my kids, which is what usually happens with my cast-offs)! Other than that the only cuation I would make is that it seems to have real problems identifying RAM correctly so you might have to go in to the bios to edit the settings.

I was using one for a while and I didn't have any problems with it. I can't comment on the pci-e performance for graphics because I had a raid card in that slot and agp graphics, but from what I hear midrange cards aren't bottlenecked and high end ones only slightly are. The slot is electrically 4x btw not 8x.

I have this mobo, a 6300 2 gigs of cheap ramp and it runs fine at around 290 fsb, I have a x1900 AIW in it and i still get over 100 fps in CS:S so it performs well enough even with higher end cards.

I got this board as a interim step to the system I really want to build.... but I find that hey, it made a great system which I am happy to keep for a while.

With this board I bought an E6600, and a 2GB ram kit, the Corsair VS2GBKIT667D2. (which I can only run at 533 speed, but buying the 533 memory isnt any cheaper) A Zalman 9500 was overkill, but keeps everything so cool, I run the fan it's slowest speed. I also bought a Enermax ELT620AWT Liberty power supply, and a wonderfully quiet and roomy Antec P180B case.

I got to reuse my ATI X850 card, which has an AGP interface, so this board was perfect for me. Oh, and it has 4 PCI slots which I like. I plugged in a Soundblaster X-Fi, a 4 port serial card (for my work), a Pinnacle video capture card, and I still have 1 slot left over for whatever else I want to try.

Let me tell you, this card is rock solid stable. I tried all kinds of overclocking timings... I mean lots of them. Well just forget it. If your hobby is squeezing every last clock cycle out of your system, save some time and just buy a faster processor and board to put it on. If you want a good and inexpensive board that just works, get this one.

The only thing I had to fuss with that wasnt default in the BIOS, is that the hard drive is system is defaulted to Raid, and I dont have a raid configuration. The first boot was kind of annoying with error messages, but once I set the BIOS to Not Raid, it was smooth sailing from there.

I recommend the Asrock 775dual-VSTA. (I'm not an Asrock employee nor affiliated with them in any way, I'm just a satisfied customer)

As another proud owner of this godly budget mobo, I have only good things to say about it. I have paired it with a 1950 pro (pci-e) and have no problems so far. Cpu E6400 o/c with fsb of 295. Rock stable out of the box. I also use 2*512mb ddr400 kingston without any problems.

Some say that it would even support quad cpu's after bios 2.1 but nobody knows for sure, since quad vsta m/b is replacing this one.

It's the first ever, for me, mobo that I buy from Asrock. I would definitely recommend it for budget builds or as an interim board. With this price you can't go wrong!

ps. lol it was funny so I copy paste it. (I'm not an Asrock employee nor affiliated with them in any way, I'm just a satisfied customer)