can anybody recommend a decent mATX board with four 240 pin ddr2 sockets? the machine will double as a work pc and htpc, with a good deal of video encoding. i can go either amd or intel route on processor: either the athlon 64 x2 4000 or the e2180. i'm not really looking to overclock, but upgradibility would be a plus.
i've been browsing newegg- the mATX boards only rarely have 4x ddr2 sockets, and when they do, the reviews are mixed. i've had my eye on this gigabyte board: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813128056 anybody have an opinion about this?
If you go with AMD those two would be your best bet, both have the new 780g chipset, with sb700 southbridge. Not to mention both are AM2+ so compatible with all current AMD socket AM2/AM2+ cpu's. Plus the ability to throw in a cheap 3470 for hybrid crossfire for ok gaming performance. And on AMD side as far as encoding goes for htpc, you might consider waiting for the phenom 9100e, for low power quad core. Take a look at the THG review for more info on the 780g.
There aren't really any intel based boards I could recommend at this point for micro atx, unless they're based off the nvidia 7050 series. Unfortunately, most of those only have 2 memory slots. Nvidia is supposed to be coming out with a hybrid SLI chipset based off the g92 graphics cards, but I haven't seen anything hit newegg or the review sites yet. And that would cover both side of the CPU types.
Message edited by Mathos on 03-05-2008 at 01:20:17 AM
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