Hey all... just wanting some 2nd opinions on a hybrid type mobo, I have this one in mind because of budget. The idea being that I can upgrade in stages rather than blowing a whole lotta $$$ to change all my HDDs, vid card, RAM etc to suit the newer gen peripherals.

Are there any other brands of mobo similar to this one? Must haves include socket 775 CPU (wanna change from AMD), 2 x IDE + SATA, PCIe and AGP, DDR and DDR2 RAM, minimum of 3 PCI slots, minimum of 4 USB2, LAN, 5.1 audio onboard.

The ASRock above doesn't seem to review too well, has anyone got one or know of any issues?

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you want this one

Gigabyte-p35-DS3P

around $180

Umm yeah, nice board... 'cept:

1. According to www.gigabyte.com.au , it is "coming soon", and

2. Doesn't have above specs such as DDR, AGP; also only has 1 IDE and 2 PCI

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MY99 WRX sedan WRC blue Sold :(
MY99 WRX sedan Dark blue pearl :D
MY97 Liberty Outback Ltd Wagon
1990 Mk3 Supra turbo fully rebuilt 7M-GTE (Older son)
1991 Celica GT4 (Younger son)

AGP is oldskewl now anyways .. Move away to a PCIe board and upgrade your graphics card.

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Should have bought an STI

I would advice to invest in a good mobo. anyways you are looking at mobo's with DDR3 now so better to go with something that only caters for DDR2 or 3 and supports PCIex.

i got one,

from netplus cost me $199. they support DDR2 ram up to 1066mhz, they have like 10 USB ports. are very reliable boards and very overclockable. Has 2x PCIe slots and supports cross-fire graphics for ATi cards.

its probably the best board you can buy under $300

not a good idea over all, you need a whole new computer

no reason why you couldn't keep your hdd's but you'll be wanting ddr2 ram and pci e video or you are just wasting your time.

should be able to get an entire computer for under 1k and a decent one at that.

You will find it difficult to do continual small upgrades to end up with a good computer. AGP is very old, so you will find it hard to find any motherboard that will still use it. Then if you do find one, it will be a crap motherboard and not have capabilities of newer CPU's, newer memory, newer video cards etc etc etc.

In the end you would have spent some money to achieve a PC that is well out of date.

My advice is to stash away close to $1k and once you have that together go out and buy the best you can.

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