Help choosing matx board

[fk49]

I'm looking to buy an matx under $100 for a budget lanbox build and htpc abilities would be an extra bonus. I'm planning on pairing it with a e2180 and overclocking

After some digging, my favorite is this one. Its listed $90 on newegg but i can get it for $50 shipped+AR on buy.com so it looks like the best deal for a high-quality intel matx board right now.

Does anyone have experience with the nforce 7000 series for intel? Esp with regards to overclocking and any problems with the single channel mem?

Or if anyone has other recommendations for a mb I'd be glad to hear those too!

Thanks

 

[Zap]

My general recommendation is to use an Asus P5K-VM. The reasons are:

1) Dual channel RAM, so you won't ever have to worry about that.
2) Performs pretty much exactly like a P35 chipset board when used with a PCI-E video card.
3) Proven overclockability.

If you end up wanting to buy one, shop around. Last I checked Newegg was around $10 more expensive on this item than some other e-tailers like Mwave.

The GF7000 series boards may be okay though... I'll copy/paste a post I made elsewhere (in Hot Deals of all places)...

I'm not sure how much performance difference (outside Sandra and other memory intensive benchmarks) dual versus single channel makes. I think the bigger performance hit on single channel is when using the IGP. If using a discrete video card, the real-world performance hit probably wouldn't be as bad as we think. Of course someone feel free to post "real-world" benchmarks to prove me wrong. Would be interesting to see.

Here's one review I found: http://www.pcstats.com/article...?articleid=2211&page=5
It compares versus various P35, x38 and 680i motherboards, and does quite well. Win some, lose some, midpack some. BTW the review board uses the GF7150 chipset. The 7050, 7100 and 7150 differ mostly in their IGP and RAID features.

SiSoft Sandra XII
Memory Bandwidth:
Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6 (X38 333/1066) 6679 6729
Asus BLITZ Formula (P35 333/1066) 6770 6807
Foxconn MARS (P35 333/1066) 6573 6450
MSI P6N Diamond (NF 680i 333/1066) 6672 6655
Biostar TF7150U-M7 (GF 7150 333/1066) 5126 5127

So, not quite half the bandwidth as feared. Latencies were a hair higher than other boards as well.

Another test was SuperPi, where 1 million digits was the same across all boards probably because it fit within cache. 8 million digits was the slowest on the Geforce7150 board. Interestingly the second slowest was the Nforce 680i, so the GF7000 series might be hampered to begin with for this test seeing as it is a possibility (though small sample size) that Nvidia chipsets are slow on this test.

PCMark Vantage severely docks the chipset for memory scores, even more than Sandra! It also loses HUGE in gaming and overall, though it was competitive in everything else. Hmmm, maybe "overall" means 40% gaming, 40% memory, 20% everything else?

In 3DMark the GF7150 is tested with both IGP and discrete. It does quite well, near par with the other boards regardless that PCMark Vantage docked it severely in gaming.

It also does quite well in Quake 4 and FEAR. Only hit was in Quake 4 "ultra quality" setting, but still wasn't too bad at around 170fps versus 191fps for a 680i with the same video card.

All in all, not too terrible a showing for a single channel memory board.

So, most things these boards are competitive, couple things don't do as well. Overall decent.

As for overclocking, you really have to do some research on this. Even with the same chipset, a board from one manufacturer can have a substantially different level of overclocking capability than a board from another manufacturer. Also, one model from a manufacturer can overclock substantially different than another model from the same manufacturer. You can't think "oh, their other board is a monster overclocker so this one must be as well." I've had an EVGA micro ATX board (socket 939) that was a terrible overclocker. Had all the settings, but extremely unstable even a hair overclocked. The Biostar Tforce7150 board in the review I linked to is a decent overclocker, but then again pretty much ALL of the Biostar Tforce series of micro ATX boards have been relatively good overclockers.