motherboard selection

All depends on $$$$ wanted to spend.
use pricewatch.com, newegg.com, priwatch will give you the location on the lowest prices, really good with video cards, newegg.com normally has free shipping and decent prices and great service. for nvidia I'ldrecommend at least the ti 4200 which falls in the $129-$179 range, if you have the money, the ti4600 has the speed to be compared to. Any reason not to look at ati?
There latest is supposed to have higher specs than the nvidia. Otherwise go for the highest FSB rated motherboard with the largest number of pci slots to give you the expansion and scooling area for fans on video cards/ cpu/ case/ maybe slot/ network cards/....
Have fun!

Take a look at
www.anandtech.com
www.extremetech.com
www.tomshardware.com

They all have comprehensive motherboard reviews....

Of the 4 mfgs listed, my personal favorite is ABit, followed by Asus.

In addition to OpatzG's recommendations, I would select a motherboard with on board RAID or additional IDE controller.
Why? That way, you can have up to 8 IDE devices.
This allows you to have a CD or DVD drive on 1 IDE channel, and a CD-RW drive on a separate channel. This speeds up any CD copying you might wish to do, without restricting your Hard drive speed, or number of drives.

I have no experience with the Nvidia motherboard chip-set.
I have been happy with the VIA chip-sets.

I advise against any motherboard with a 'mixed' chip-set. Make sure that both the north-bridge and south-bridge are from the same chip mfg.

For gaming, you want to install either W98, or XP.
If XP, go with the Pro version.

If W98, be aware that there is a bug in the W9X code that can cause some problems if you install more than 511MB of RAM.

Chas

I suggest a EPOX 8RDA motherboard with a with a G-Force 4 Ti 4200 graphics card (AGP). I have put together many computers and find that EPOX Motherboards are very reliable and excellent for gaming. DDR Memory is what you want for gaming as well. Shop around. You can find great deals.

Good Luck

Paul

My personal favorite is the Asus. I built about 100 systems with them in the last two years, and I've sold them all over the country. To this day only one board ever had a problem.

I to would also go with the Nvidia chipset video cards. The Geforce 4's are nice, the Ti4200 is the best value. My personal favorite is still the Geforce 3/Ti200 though. Might not have some of the latest and greatest features, but if you want to save a few bucks and have an excellent video card, this will out perform some of the low-end Geforce 4 cards.

If you go get something faster than a 2100+, be sure you have plenty of cooling though. The newer chips run extremely hot. That was the main reason I went back the running a Pentium 4 in my new machine. Well, that and the 533 MHz Bus. But of course I am still running an Asus board.

Read the reviews, and then check your budget. For a 2.x Athlon, I would recommend the Asus A7V333; they make one with RAID on board, only runs an extra $20 or so.

Asfor the O/S, XP is in fact the way to go. I have benched marked these systems with Win 98 & XP. The video performance is about 35% better with XP. Plus it is so, so much more stable. On the bad side, some of your older games may no longer work.

Good luck,

Vic

I use MSI boards. From most of the reviews over the years that I've read said they are very reliable and stable using the VIA chipset and AMD processors. I'm currently using the KT3 Ultra 2 R boards and they just run solid. I frequent the MSI fourmsand have seen posts about people having problems with their MSI boards and the answers the MSI techs come up with to resolve those problems all were based on overclocking. MSI boards are not overclocker boards.

Right now the Radeon 9700 All in Wonder card is the hot graphics card. From test results comparing the Radeon verses the new nVidia FX card, the Radeon beats the new FX in almost all catagories. There is a gaming community [www.dasmerg.net] which regulary posts comments on new hardware or where you can post questions. Some good news items about these comparisons can be found there.

So you want a jam up computer do ya? I just built several gaming machines for a couple of guys. The have LAN parties all the time and wanted four "SCREAMERS" as they called it. After a bunch of looking around I decided on the ABIT NF7-M. http://www.abit-usa.com/products/mb/nf7-m/techspec.php I have got to tell you those were some smoking machines. It has a NVIDIA Geforce 4 MX 8X AGP integrated video along with a true 24 bit sound card and USB 2.0. The LAN card is also onboard. I basically added a processor, memory and a 1394-firewire card. Since they wanted to run 98SE I keep the memory at 384 Meg. (There is a bug in 98 that occurs after 511 Megs of ram). Them were some nice machines. $138 bucks for the motherboard was not bad. I did geta discount because I bought four of them plus the RAM at the same time. This particular motherboard sounds like a perfect fit for what you are looking for. Have fun!

Just a note; Currently am running a Soyo SY-P4ISR w/ an Intel P4 2.0 GB CPU w/ 3GB of SDRAM installed in 3 slots (1GB ea. slot)on a dual boot (Win89SE & 2K) plus a Raid Mirrored Array and using the Cacheman 5.11 utility installed and the RAM limit to 512MB set in the Advanced area of msconfig utility.

The thing is more stable than I have seen it ever while gaming (or otherwise), and have played around w/ the limitation of the 512MB RAM bug for a while in many combinations, but that Cacheman utility adjusts constantly and takes no real CPU power at all.

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