Gigabyte GA-7DXR+

Current system with the Gigabyte GA-7DXR+ Mainboard:

Windows XP Home Edition SP2.

ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb graphics card.

Athlon XP 2000+ cpu, if I remember rightly.

PNY technologies 768mb PC2100 266mhz ram (1x256mb and 1x512mb).

Compaq 21" CRT Monitor running at 1280x960 pixel resolution.

420 watt PSU.

As good as this board has been, it's 2008 and time for an upgrade for me as I need an SLi or Crossfire-capable motherboard to run modern games.

Back when I bought this in 2002/2003, it wasn't exactly top of the range but a very capable platform for my needs at the time.

If you are looking for one of these now, you'll obviously get one for pennies but unless you enjoy playing old pc games or slightly modern-ish games with most graphical features turned off OR if your idea of multitasking is wordprocessing whilst listening to Winamp then I'd recommend the Gigabyte

GA-7DXR+ motherboard, but personally I feel I'm being left behind while this is my main computer as it is a bit long in the tooth, now, but as a second PC for browsing the Interweb then it's difficult to fault.

A good budget board. If you're looking to overclock like mad, get another board. I'm not sure if it keeps the pci bus at 33mhz or not, but i'm not going to be the one to try it out. You can push the bus from 133 up to probably 140 with little trouble at all, i've only tried to go to 137, and it was fine. My board had some fast silicon, so it was defaultly clocked at 134.5mhz, so it can go much higher, and with nothing but standard cooling, it should be fine. An absolutely wonderful board, great purchase!

Very good one and support up to 2600+ which clock at 2.13Ghz and easy to update BIOS without any problems.

Very good and cheaper to buy from Dabs.com for £78.72 inc vat & free delivery also support AMD Athlon XP 2200+