Anyone make/made a motherboard like this?

My old Soyo motherboard's teetering on the brink of death, so I figured I'd upgrade from my Athlon XP1800 to a dual-core 4800 Brisbane. Already bagged a CPU for $53 off eBay so now it's MB time.

What I'm curious about is if anyone offers traditional motherboards with an AM2 socket. I'm not a gamer and a lot of the work I do involves older hardware. I'd really like to find a board with lots of traditional PCI slots (only need one PCIe for the video card), two or more old ATA connectors, and few integrated features. Or at least not a massive pile of multimedia-oriented features.

Anybody know if this exists?

This was the closet I could find to what you asked for:

Gigabyte GA-M61P-S3

4 PCI slots, 2 PCI-E, and 1 PCI-E x16. Also support for up to 16 GB RAM. IMHO you should stick to Gigabyte regardless of which model you buy.

Only 1 PATA connector but PATA is for all intents and purposes dead. You could always get one of those Promise Ultra 133 cards if you need more PATA slots.

jtr's recommendation is a good one. Only potential issue is that it's open box, but it may still work.

If you're able to get by with 3 PCI's, and don't mind having two 16X PCI-E's (you certainly have the option of using only one), more choices open up. Unfortunately though, with a full size ATX board, it looks like you're stuck with 1 PATA channel on the AM2 platform no matter which board. Micro-ATX will give you two PATA's though.

How many PATA drives (HDD + optical) are you using?

That looks pretty good for the most part, although I won't have much use for the onboard video since I use a DVI monitor.

My configuration has gotten lighter in recent years, but I can end up with a lot of hardware in there. At its peak, I had two PATA optical drivers, two PATA hard drives, a three SCSI drives, and both a 3.5" and 5.25" floppy. The ability to use my existing stock of PATA hard drives is probably the most important thing. I get a lot of them off client upgrades or scrapped systems.

For PCI stuff I usually have a sound card, SCSI card, USB card, Firewire card, modem, and something else. With the newer boards' heavy on-board USB/FW appointment I don't see using those anymore. I could also delete the sound card depending on how hi-performance the new MB's onboard is.

Last fall I also built a system around a 4800X2 and this is the motherboard I purchased. It has decent onboard video and a DVI connector. Only one PATA controller but for about a hundred dollars I got a SATA 360Gig hard drive and a SATA DVD burner. I got two gig of this DDR2-800 memory as well and look at the current deal, $34 after rebate, even good price before rebate. No problems with the motherboard or any of the components. You got your CPU wicked cheap, make sure it comes with a heatsink or make sure you have one if not.

I've been digging through manufacturers' sites for the last few hours--my head hurts. Seems like I can find some features I want on boards that are missing things I really need.

At the moment twin IDE and extra PCI slots are more of a bonus than a requirement. Now I'm just trying to find something that has legacy back-panel connectors, a decent chipset, good internal port location, and at least 3 PCI.

My CPU's a bare pull. I'm probably going to pick up a cheap stock AMD heatsink until I can afford a performance model and start 'clocking.

Unfortunately, there's exceedingly little choice if you need parallel and serial ports on AM2, and even then, you'll have to go micro-ATX, and ditch your PCI-E vid card for an AGP. This MSI board is the only thing I can find, but it uses VIA for both north and south bridge instead of nVidia. Should do the trick for what you need though, and it's cheap, and decently reviewed!

After looking once again at jtr1962's finding, I just realized it's also got the LPT and COM ports! The nVidia chipset helps too.

Excellent find, jtr!

ABTOMAT said:

What I'm curious about is if anyone offers traditional motherboards with an AM2 socket. Anybody know if this exists?

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"Traditonal" for me would have been ISA.

I have always bit the bullet and abandoned the "old" technology. I've never regretted it in the long run as adding new stuff can frequently be a big problem.
My current desktop came with USB 1 and the after market USB 2 card has been a royal pain.

I have habit of keeping with older hardware until it's no longer practical. Until last year I was the proud user of the only model of DDR-supporting Socket A board ever made with an ISA slot (Biostar M7MIA with RAID)) I bought it because I had a 7-year-old modem that was faster than anything else on the local phone lines.

Also until last year I had a SyQuest drive and a 5.25" floppy in that same Athlon 1800 PC. The previous year I also had a Bernoulli drive in there. I still use a SCSI scanner and ZIP drive, plus I have a huge collection of external storage drives sitting around for an emergency. I figure I can read most removable formats made from 1986 to 1998.

Well, I threw my requirements out the window in exchange for what hopefully's a good deal. Got a DFI LANparty NForce 590 SL-M2R/G used off eBay for $76. It's a fairly expensive overclocker's board with a powerful digital voltage regulator, SLI video, fancy BIOS, 8 SATA ports, etc. It had 3 PCI slots so I should be set in that regard.

The thing's missing the onboard audio riser. I hope DFI has replacement parts.

Anyone have some cheap DD2 RAM and a PCIe video card?

Interesting article from Tom's Hardware of a new chipset. According to Tom, AMD has released a motherboard chipset with by far the most powerful onboard graphics then previous systems, capable of running your home theater setup no problem and playing some games as well also being very energy efficient. Certainly if I was putting together an AMD system now I'd look for a mb with this chipset.

ABTOMAT said:

Anyone have some cheap DD2 RAM and a PCIe video card?

Click to expand...

Newegg! Duh. Do not get less than 4GB (2x2).