Recommended motherboard?

[Luc the Tinkerer]

Since the general consensus was that Pentium II CPU's beat the crap out of Celeron's, I decided to upgrade my CPU to a Pentium II 400.

Problem! My motherboad can only support up to Celeron 300 and PII 333, so no matter what setting I specify in my BIOS, it defaults to Pentium II 266!

That is due to my crappy Houston/PC-Chips motherboard's EX/LX chipset, and when I have the cash, I'll upgrade the motherboard to a better product, but which? There must be a motherboard out there that won't cost an arm and provide proper performance for HD recording!

All feedback is appreciated!

 

[Emeric]

Any motherboard is better than Houston.. no offense.

The Abit VA6 is quite good, ATA/66, cheap too. Has built in Audio on some of them but easily disabled.

Asus P3B-F or F1 are also good boards.

For future upgrades, I wouldn't get too hung up on the PC-133 spec - here today gone tommorow. It will make about as much difference as 100MHz made for 66MHz.

 

[DigitalDon]

I really don't think you could beat the Abit BE6 II (Revision 2) motherboard. This second revision just came out in Oct 99 so I wouldn't think the price will drop much very soon. You can find it on http://www.pricewatch.com for about $135 (US). Make sure you read the details. I have seen original BE6 boards (not revision 2) selling for the same price or $10 cheaper than the revision 2. Supports up to 450MHz PII, 700MHz PIII. Chipset is Intel 440BX. Supports up to 4 Ultra DMA66 drives (DMA33 also). AGP to 2x. SDRAM to 768MB. One AGP slot, 5 PCI slots and 1 ISA slot. Also 2 USB connectors. You can start out cheap with a PII 450MHz processor (about $130) then upgrade to faster PIII's when the price drops. Hope this gave you a good starting place.