AOpen AX4PE Max - motherboard - ATX - i845PE

Advantages: Cheap and lots of features
Disadvantages: average overclocking ability

...The AOpen AK77-600 Max has a unique feature of having double bios chips, specially these days when virus attacks are common these days. With having twin bios, the second bios can store a good bios version that can be used when the first bios other one fails. It is also bundled with a Norton virus 2003, s very helpful software which can protect you from e-mail worms and viruses. This board has via kt600 chipset instead of an nforce 2. The motherboard has a little heat sink at the middle which helps to avoid overheating. All the headers of this motherboard are place on the near bottom of the motherboard. The USB 2.0 header s located at the second third PCI slots. A total of 6 USB ports are located at the back panel of this board. There is also a printer port and 2 ps/2 ports. Four mounting holes are located in CPU sockets, which free... Read review

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Advantages: Fast, cheap, stable, excellent support and v good manual
Disadvantages: Requires a minimum of Win ME upwards

...Ive been using the MSi 845E max (6566e) motherboard for the past 2 years and it still performs as stable now as it did back then. The board itself is very well packaged and comes with all the usual extras including drivers CD and IDE cables for both CD-roms/hard drives and floppy disc aswell as an excellently informative and well laid out manual. The 845E Max by MSi supports all Pentium 4 processors as well as Celerons upto 3.06 ghz using the built in 845E Intel chipset and includes full support for both 133mhz front side bus (FSB) quad pumped (133 x 4 = 533 fsb) Pentium 4's and 184 pin PC 2100 (266mhz) DDR memory upto 2 ghz, there are 2 available memory slots which is plenty for most people and i whole heartedly recommend firstly adding 1 x 512mb of DDR to the motherboard so as to leave 1 free DDR slot if you ever chose to add... Read review

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Advantages: Has RAID, 266 FSB, upto 4 IDE’s, cheap
Disadvantages: 1.33 Ghz speed limit

...Erm… Well no actually! Motherboards can be drastically different in quality and speed. You just need to know how to look at them and what are the good and bad points of them all. Okay so here goes for the bad points about the Abit SoA AMD 761 ATX R motherboard Bad points: ~~~~~~~ 1. Windows will fight you over which device drivers are best and you’ll generally end up not even using the disk of drivers they give you. The navigation on the disk is painful at best and could be so much simpler. 2. There is no on-board sound (which I consider a plus personally, but others may not) (On board sound is normally crap!) 3. It may not come with the CMOS cleared (Mine didn’t and wouldn’t do a thing till I clear it! V. Annoying) (CMOS is your internal clock, and bios setup options) 4. It will only cope... Read review

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