Building a system, suggestions?

[e_storm]

I might be building a system for someone in the near future. He owns a small business and above all the system has to be stable and not have problems that would cause him to lose data. As little maintenance as possible is probably best too.

The computer would be used for various small business applications and probably not much else. I'm thinking video and sound are not very important so probably an integrated board would be fine. I've built a few systems for me, but I tend to get stable OC'able boards and higher end stuff than he doesn't need. Have any of you had much experience with building cheap, reliable systems? What kind of boards do you use?

I pretty much know whats out there, but I'm wondering what kind of first hand experience you've had with some of them and which ones you'd recommend. I tend to automatically think AMD for price reasons, but any Intel suggestions are fine too.

thanks

[Holst]

If this has to bbe very cheap then I probably wont be of much help..

Personally Id use some form of duron..800-1ghz depending on price.

Elite K7S5A motherboard ...very cheap and supprisingly high spec..takes DDR or SDRAM depending on what you have on hand/can afford. Sone form of onboard sound too.

Then id just bung a cheap AGP card in...matrox G400 a TNT or Geforce2mx200...all avalable pretty cheaply.

You might get cheaper with a fully onboard board..although I wouldnt know much about that..I think the Nforce boards will be too expensive.

Get him a nice big monitor (depending on desk space) a big monitor allways goes down well.

If I wanted the ultimate in reliability then my gigabyte BX2000 P3 board has been brilliant...running in a abused overclocked state for three years still going strong with no problems at all.

[cloasters]

The ultimate budget biz mainboard for a Duron or Athlon processor is probably the Asus A7S-VM. It's a full-sized(full-sized, big deal, right? I mention this because many Micro-ATX mobo's aren't full size. It's a surprisingly wide mobo)Micro-ATX form factor mainboard. It sports four PCI slots, that's it--no ISA, and no AGP slots. Before dismissing this mainboard, it does have interesting strengths:

Built-in Video, Sound and LAN. The sound is plenty good enough. The Video is good enough to play UT, and the LAN is a sure 'nuff LAN---not the oddball LAN that's built-in to the ECS K7S5A. Alright already--the ECS's LAN works fine, but it's an ECS or SiS LAN. Not an Intel or 3com or some other well known LAN.

If you want to use any or all of the built-in "PCI cards," be sure to install the drivers for them, and enable them in BIOS. Caveat: if you want to use built-in "cards," use them forever. No kidding. Disabling say, the Soundcard after its driver has been installed may well render the Soundcard useless, forever. It happened to me with two different SiS chipsetted mainboards. Maybe you'll be lucky.

I found it for less than $80 on Pricewatch. Sadly, ResellerRatings seems to be history. Therefore, I can recommend one etailer. I bought my A7S-VM from this outfit. It was a hair less than $100 after tax. I think it's worth it. www.infotechnow.com . Caveat emptor, as always.

[e_storm]

cool, thanks for the suggestion. That was exactly what I was looking for.

[cloasters]

Thanks for the "thank you." It's nice when advise actually helps!

[martin]

I can't believe that ECS can sell a board so good for such a low price! The K7S5A has to be the best price/performance piece of hardware in the whole computer industry. For $85 bucks cdn this board is giving me a woody with it's amazing features, it's almost as cheap as buying a beer in Bufffalo....LOL. You can drop in an Athlon 1.2ghz cpu for a couple of dollars more and add one of those TNT2 32m video cards for the price of a movie and popcorn for two. A 20g HDD and 256m pc-133 sdram rounds out a potent yet inexpensive system that could do just about anything other than intensive multimedia. And do it without having to get a bank loan!. Laughing....