Best PC motherboard under £150? (230 E / 230 $ ish)

[Cyberus]

Been out of the loop for a while and have been asked to help a mate build a 'puter. He probably can't go wrong buying the components himself, but I wanna make sure he gets a good mobo - any recommendations?

(He'll most likely be using it for games, music, and watching video only)

Cheers

[whabang]

Which platform are you looking at? Intel? AMD? ViA?

Personally, I use the ECS 661FX-M, which is a fantastic motherboard, however, Socket 478 is not a good choice for a new computer, as it's being phased out by Intel?

[amigagr]

i prefer gigabyte motherboards (with amd cpus), i have work with many of them and i believe that they deserve their money.

[motrucker]

ASUS and Gigabyte are generally the best. I have built excellent machines with both. I prefer the AMD CPUs, but these boards come in either flavor if you really prefer the intel CPU.

[dammy]

My vote is for a decent ASUS nForce mobo.  That way it can boot into AROS which supports.  AMD64 should also work and have the bonus of supporting AROS X86_64's release this summer.

Dammy

[tonyvdb]

I also agree with the others ASUS and Gigabyte are the best.
My P-III  ASUS is now over 6 years old and is still working great and I have Gigabyte with a AMD 1800+ thats also been flawless.

[Bazzaq]

Any asus or gigabyte board with an nforce chipset would be the best decision..

Gigabyte for reliability though.

[dammy]

This ASUS Mobo looks like most folks are pretty happy with it.

Dammy

[amigadave]

Check out the guides at www.Arstechnica.com they have recommendations for complete lists of parts for budget, hot rod and god machines and appear to me to be very impartial and truthful in their choices.

[K7HTH]

ASUS, hands down.

[odin]

Is there any particular reason why it is worth shelling out so much money for a mobo when there are also decent ~100EUR ASUS motherboards?

[kd7ota]

HIGHLY recommend Asus....

MSI is my 2nd best choice.

3rd would be ECS boards...


Gigabyte I have had terrible luck with and actually benchmarked slower then Asus boards.  :-)

Either way, you should get a rocking board for next to nothing. Got a Socket 478 with SATA and 8x agp for $46


If you buy recent stuff, it shouldnt be much of a problem if it is going to work or not.  Put one together and see how far it takes you. Have fun with it.  :-)

[Cyberus]

odin wrote:
Is there any particular reason why it is worth shelling out so much money for a mobo when there are also decent ~100EUR ASUS motherboards?

Well, I just asked how much he had to spend, and he plucked a few figures out of the air - he has a few hundred quid spare. But I probably won't recommend he actually buy a mobo that costs 150 quid. He won't be using RAID, he won't be overclocking, etc


Thanks to everyone for your replies - I guess Asus still dominate in terms of performance then?

[Colin_Camper]

Gigabyte K8N51GMF-9 DDR400, uATX1, PCI-E, 7.1Ch Audio £47.65

This motherboard won Micromarts' group test overall.

[lorddef]

MSI Make some good boards, but they can be flakey. I've got an MSI at the moment with no probs but I've seen quite a few just die like b*tches, they're cheap.

I've never had a single problem with an ASUS or a Gigabyte.