Best Motherboards

Try FRY's Electronics. They are my superstore for anything electronic. Mother boards, CD/DVD drives, hard drives, video cards, sound cards, monitors and any kind of printer, scanner or device to connect to a computer. Plus any kind of cable you need. I'm like a kid in a candy store, I always find what I need. They even have weekly adds, just todat they had a simple P4
motherboard, 3Ghz, 800Mhz frontside buss for only $159. That's a deal for that MOBO. Too bad I'm not building a new machine yet. YET

I would say shop around and find what fits you and your budget.
As far as Vista Ready.... I would think that it may install Vista, but it would run like crap. To get decent performance from Vista, a 2.2+ Ghz proc and min. 512 MB Ram will be needed. Better with an dual core proc and 1-2GB Ram

http://www.newegg.com

I use them for all my computer needs.

As I'm not in the US I will not even try to point you to a supplier.

As for Socket A M'Boards they are now officially Dead there may be a few left over from Old Stock but AMD has moved away from this socket a while ago. Any that you do see will be old Chip Sets and not as fast as the newer AMD CPU's/M'Board combinations.

But regarding Vista the CPU is big enough the RAM could be more but should work but 512 is really the Minimum and 1 GIG better and as you didn't mention what Video card you have that's a debatable question. Vista needs at least 64 MEG of Video RAM to run Aero and 128 is better.

The current Vista Beta that is available is a Resource Hog and needs a lot of system resources though MS claim that it will work on a 800 MHZ CPU I personally wouldn't want to try it on one. Currently I have it loaded on a Pentium Extreme a Dual Core with Hyper Threading, + 4 GIG of RAM and it's so slow.

If you are prepared to wait it will run and should be stable but it's going to be Really Slow.

Col

Socket A like socket 478 motherboards will be available for a good year or two more, all MB mfg'ers have loads of them in stock to sell, my supplier still lists many makes including Asus Abit MSI ECS & DFI. Heck they still list some socket 370 MB's, with a note they were discontinued March 2006 but still have available stock.

If you can locate a "good" local PC shop (not a big box type outfit like a Newegg, there focused on the here & now of products not the past) they should have no trouble getting you whatever you want in socket A MB, but good PC shops are scarce so don't be fooled by wannabes.

Here the story on Vista requirements & as HAL pointed out you'll need to upgrade your RAM, I have some friends running the beta on 1.6GHz & 1.8GHz PC's & it runs smooth without any problems.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060614-7060.html

Like CM5400 already listed... www.newegg.com is a great company. Actually, the parent company is Acer, which is why they carry the entire Acer line of products. I have spent well over $40,000 in parts with newegg over the last 3 years, before that I was using www.mwave.com. Other favorites include... Monarch Computers and ZipZoomFly.com

You can still find Socket A motherboards around, but don't bother with any of the "extended warranty" plans as Socket A boards will soon be EVEN more harder to locate. If you want to use some of your existing hardware, before you upgrade, consider this the last go around with your Socket A CPU.

As far as brands of motherboard, I have always been an "enthusiast" (meaning I like to modify and tweak the hell out of my systems), and would buy the brands geared towards the enthusiasts... Abit & Asus primarily. DFI has recently won my dollars (ever since the nForce 4 chipset was released). There are many other brands available... best thing to do is find one that has become popular, and has a warranty. Never purchase, refurbished electronic equipment.