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I need some pointers on what you guys feel is a straight to the point motherboard and why. I would like one that is my main/portable the case has a handle. Some people say no onboard for home systems and others say all onboard for portable. The graphics card cannot be onboard in my situation.
By motherboard...you mean pretty much the motherboard & case? Because I don't see very many motherboards with handles.
Any ideas on a budget? I'll see if I can price something fun in the $600 to $900 range and post back. I'll be focusing on portable and gaming. I'm going to leave out the monitor/LCD, because that really increases the price. Anyways...I'll reply again after I put something together...
Edit:
A computer (Shuttle Barebones + 120GB HDD + CPU + RAM) for ~$630 -- http://secure.newegg.com/app/WishR.asp?ID=928647
You'd need to get a CD-ROM drive, and video card. But basically everything else is covered pretty well. The A64 3000+ is pretty powerful in games although I couldn't find the 1MB L2 version for a decent price.
Don't know how well it would overclock though...
no, the case I own has a handle. This is just the mobo
What is the processor you have already? (Each family of processors needs a compatible motherboard, IE Intel P4 & AMD Athlon64 are not compatible) Or is this a Mobo + CPU combo?
Usually you can pick up a full featured motherboard for around $100. And most of the big/popular companies have a pretty good package in the $50 range too.
It really doesn't matter too much what motherboard you get. What matters is the chipset. For AMD, this is usually nForce2 chipset (VIA chipset is an option, but I don't know it well). For Intel, there is a lot of chipsets (SiS & VIA & Intel I think) that probably take some extra research before getting it right, because at least one of them supposedly have huge issues with math / FloatingPointUnit? (at least in laptops I think?).
If your looking for just motherboard then I recommend Gigabyte. I just bought this motherboard and it works great. No integrated video, support for SATA and IDE drives, hardware raid and all kinds of other goodies.
http://tw.giga-byte.com/Motherboard/...0V%20Pro2.htm#
Edit: Its for AMD processor, but they do have boards for Intel.
Before we suggest you a motherboard, you got to tell us
What processor and what socket?
What type of memory you want to put : DDR or DDR-2?
PCI-Express Video Card or AGP?
What type of speaker you have? (You can live with Onboard sound if you have 2 speaker but I recommand atleat a cheap SoundBlaster for 5.1 Speaker)
IDE or S-ATA hard drive?