HELP, new and lost

[sirzagsalot]

Hey guys,

Been helped here before and looking for some more great advice.

I am building a pc for the first time. I want it to be a reliable and fast for your average user. i also plan on doing some gaming in my limited free time, mainly TF2 and portal (not gonna lie, those two games are whats pushing me to finally upgrade.) the games dont have to look like melted sugar, but i would like them to run smoothly. I have picked out most of my parts and its down to the mobo, which has become the most complicated part yet. I am trying to spend no more than 100 on the mobo.

My questions are:

How important is the chipset of the mobo in overall performance of the machine? What is the minimum i should be thinking about? Any one have good a good resource comparing chip sets?

Looking at newegg, it seems that alot of the satisfaction people have with a mobo deals with things like the bios. ill be honest, i dont even know how to get to the bios right now. i prob wont oc or do anything fancy like raid. will this stuff affect me? how do i judge how good a mobo is other than looking at chipset and ports and such.

Lastly, suggest a mother board! i need it to be reliable, fast and inexpensive (dont we all). im prob not gonna do to much fancy stuff with my comp, so i dont need some of the high end features. my max budget is 100 bucks

parts i have ordered so far.

AMD Athalon 5600
POWERCOLOR X1950PRO512
2x1GB ram DDR800
Seagate 72.1000 250 GB
Thermaltake 650W PSU

is 100 dollars reasonable?

long winded but,
THANKS!

 

[lunyone]

Here's a few mobo's that I've found, for various reason's. $100 for an AMD AMR board is more than resonable. I've seen people use $50 mobo's for OC'ing the AMD's and they work fine, but they usually sacrifice options by getting the $50 mobo. I, for one, like the 2nd mobo listed, because it has what I need and has one of the newer chipsets. It also has a DVI output, incase your GPU dies, you can pull the GPU and still use your computer LCD w/out an adapter.
Mobo - $61 shipped Good Asus board w/2 IDE and 4 SATA (2 @ 1.5gb and 2 @ 3.0gb)
ASUS M2V-MX AM2 VIA K8M890 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131143

Mobo - $65 shipped Asus 690G chipset w/DVI output
ASUS M2A-VM AM2 AMD 690G Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131172

Mobo - $86 shipped - $10 MIR = $76 Has HDMI port!
BIOSTAR TForce TF7050-M2 AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 7050PV HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard – Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138061

Just remember to look at the options that they each have and decide with mobo has all of the options that you want. Remember to think about whether or not you will need alot of PCI expansion slots or not. Most people don't need to have an additional sound card, because the onboard sound is quite well these days.

 

[sirzagsalot]

Thanks unyone,

Do you see any downside to getting a microATX board?

 

[sirzagsalot]

Also how does the AMD 690 compare to an nvidia 570? i cant really find any good charts comparing mobo chipsets

 

[lunyone]

Thanks unyone,

Do you see any downside to getting a microATX board?

I don't, but if you need a ton of expansion slots, than you'll won't want one. Most people don't use 1 or 2 slots even, so I'm not sure what your plans are.

 

[BUFF]

mATX mobos apart from not having the expansion capabilities of a full ATX often have more limited BIOS options as well.

abit's AN-M2/AN-M2HD are nice mATX AM2 boards.