Re: [Hampshire] Suggestions for replacement motherboard

trotter wrote:
>
> I expect the pci graphics card would be worse than on board gfx nowadays
> particularly since newish motherboards have to support gfx heavy vista premium.
>
> I bought a gigabyte ga-ep35c-ds3r with quad core in the last two weeks but
> the ide port has been a real pain. It wouild only pick up one hard
> drive the slave
> it didnt like nor a optical drive either.
>
> On the windows side the drivers installation software didnt like xp sp3.
> This motherboard has been quite a pain really but now its working its nice
> enough.
>
> Almost all the motherboards i could find have only 1 ide port which could
> mess things up if you get some weird config error like i did. Also if you have
> 3 ide devices you will have to get a pata to sata adaptor to use it.
>
>

I have three ASRock boards here (John flinches away!) that offer a
flexible approach in that they have both PCI-e and AGP, SATA and IDE and
support two types of memory.

Of the three (one of which I have since passed on to a mate), none have
let me down yet despite the relatively low initial outlay. The reviews
tend to go towards 'nothing spectacular in terms of advanced
functionality and performance, but great for people with older kit they
would like to mix with new'.

All of them play nice with Linux and one of them offers on-board
graphics too, although I have never used it and cannot comment on the
output.

Sean