I have been asked to build a relatively cheap computer for the son of a friend and am thinking of using an Elite motherboard.

Does anyone have any advice or experience of these boards?

It would be a socket A, with 200mhz/266mhz FSB; probably with an AMD Duron 1GHZ processor, 128MB RAM (DIMM PC133), 40GB hdd, and separate AGP graphics and sound, as I do not believe in the use of onboard chipsets!

Any comments would be welcome - as the maximum for the whole system, including the monitor is about £500.

Thanks in advance.

Anisah

Here's a suggested system to suit your budget. The mobo has onboard AC97 audio, which is fine but you can disable it and I've included a soundcard in the list. I sourced all this stuff from www.ebuyer.com. I'm not suggesting you follow the list rigidly, but it's a guide. For another £60.00 or so you could use an Athlon XP CPU. All prices listed exclude VAT but it's been added at the end of the list.

ECSK7S5A Motherboard, 133 FSB, DDR/SDR RAM, on board audio - £41.78

Duron 1Ghz CPU - £38.35

Coolermaster DP5 7H53F CPU Cooler - £5.74

Nokia Style ATX Midi Tower Case, 300W PSU - £18.06

Philips 107E 17" Monitor - £99.46

128MB DDR PC2100 RAM - £36.75

IBM Deskstar 40Gb 7200 Hard Disk - £65.07

Prolink Geoforce Ti 64MB DDR TV Out Vid card - £67.14

Sound Blaster PCI 128 Sound Card - £12.53

Logitech Internet Navigator Keyboard - £18.94

Logitech 3 button Mouse - £8.51

PCI 56K Internal Hardware Modem - £7.90

Net: £420.23

VAT: £73.54

Total: £493.77

Oops, forgot a CD ROM drive and a floppy disk drive. Add about £25.00 for a CD ROM drive and £8.00 for a floppy drive = £33.00 +

Total: £526.77

OK, that's a little over £500.00, but there are areas you could save on. You could go for a 15" Monitor instead of a 17"; SDR RAM instead of DDR; not use a sound card, use the onboard sound; get a cheaper keyboard & mouse; a lower specced video card, etc, etc.

Anyway, for £500.00 worth of parts and putting the thing together, I'd probably charge about £650.00 (no, I don't do it for a living).

As I said, not written in stone but I hope it gives you some ideas.

Good luck!

Wow flops, thats a pretty good PC you priced up there!!! 17" monitor for £100 - I payed £300 not even 2 years ago!

Not a bad "spec" there from Flopps, and yep, can get a reasonable 17" monitor for around £117 + VAT.

You could opt for a lesser AGP video card & get a gForce 2 MX400 32mb for around £38 + VAT will play ALL the games out there at the moment.

I would lean towards 256Mb of memory but as is creeping up at the moment a 128 stick will do, add another stick later ASAP.

Any other questions then please fire away.

just watching

Uh, yes, of course *cough* ahem, erm, etc. And there was me thinking 'ECS' was an entity. I overlooked the fact the 'E' from ECS stood for Elite.

Silly old me :crazy:

I'm going to allow myself the luxury of an edit methinks

hehe .. that cought both of us out ... When I went looking for the BIOS update I could not figure out why I couldn't find it?

Google found it after I typed in the board number. :spin:

Dunno if you guys can get em over there but Shuttle makes some decent "entry level" boards. I have built a system for the wife with one and it has given me the least amount of trouble of any board I have used.

Also FIC has some pretty decent cheap Audio onboard motherboards.


TheHeretic

But in a limited supply. Just passed on an FIC 2013 still going strong. Innit Flopps.

Ummmmmm...... no.

That's actually the board that suffered a lot of peculiar quirks and staged it's final demise by taking out an internal PCI modem and a new Muse sound card.

I managed to exchange the sound card as faulty with it's supplier, CCL, and you sent me a spare modem - remember?

It turned out the RAM was up the creek as well.

You did warn me there was something up with it, and I still apreciate you giving them to me. The CPU was OK though, I got that overclocked to 500 in a system right now. Using a FOP32 on it.

Sorry, Mr Mucks

On the subject of FIC motherboards, I still got a FIC 403+ going strong after 4 years or so. Has 2 sticks of 128MB 66Mhz RAM and a K6-2 300 CPU.

I would still buy a FIC mobo, I think they're good.