Advantages: Very cheap, intelligent electronics keep wasted disks to a minimum
Disadvantages: None so far. How long can something this cheap last?

...-RW and 24 speed read machine, was, as I’ve said, a good machine at the time of purchase, but it’s replacement, an AOpen CRW5224, is only costing me a shade over £30 (yes thirty!) from www.dabs.com, AND it’s got a maximum write speed to CD-R of 52x, making full CD copies possible in just a few minutes, and I do mean a few. AOpen may well be more familiar to you as the makers of motherboards. Even if this machine only lasts the 12-month guarantee period and no longer, it’ll only cost me 66p a week to own (as for the DVD player, the most that can cost me is 50p a week thanks to the 2-year warranty). Every month beyond the first year is a bonus for the AOpen, and if it lasts as long as the Yamaha, it’ll cost me about 22p a week. Anyway, that’s got the skinflint bits out of the way. What’s it like to install and use? A BIT OF THE OLD ‘IN OUT... Read review

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Advantages: Extremely quite, beautiful machine
Disadvantages: CPU Cooling fan & the floppy drive connector are placed

...The latest craze in the computer world is miniture computer systems first introduced to us as the 'Shuttle' system. Since then many have taken a stab at this market and the EZ18 is AOpens answer to the call. The EZ18 comes in two colours to my knowledge (pearl white, and slick black)so its possible to accessorise according to your personal preference. I myself went for the slick black (or piano black as my friend calls it) with the glowing blue power button. I bought mine from Microdirect for about £148. Unlike some of its counterparts (the shuttle system, BioStar system) the EZ18 is more of a cube rather than a single story tower and it comes with the bare essentials (partly why they have been called 'barebone' systems). It comes with the motherboard which holds the sound card aswell as the on board graphics(i think its nVidia n... Read review

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Advantages: Features rich, FSB 800MHz, USB2.0, Firewire, Dual Channel DDR, Supports upto 3.2Ghz, Prescott Ready, RAID, 8x AGP, On-board 1GB LAN, On-board Sound, Supports 4GB DDR RAM IT TALKS!
Disadvantages: Expensive, Asus website is SLOW.

.... It’s quite expensive at over £100. I would prefer to have paid less for this motherboard. Even though it costs so much, it still doesn’t support the fastest Pentium processors. It supports the 3.4Ghz AFTER a BIOS update but 3.6Ghz use a differenttype of CPU altogether. Those use the newer Socket T / PGA775 cpu. Either way, it's the top board in the Asus socket 478 range. • • • • • • • • • • • • JARGON BUSTER: Socket 478 describes the CPU socket type on the motherboard. You will need a CPU with a Socket 478 interface for it to fit into the motherboard. • • • • • • • • • • • • This board has a port for an Asus Wi-Fi (Wireless) card. You do not need to use this but I think they were just trying to flog their own wireless card, as you can get PCI Wi-Fi cards. I think that was rather pointless unless the board came with one... Read review

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Advantages: features SATA, dual channel memory
Disadvantages: lacks modern features such as ddr2 and pci express

...If your like i was before stuck with a pretty decent socket 478 CPU such as a Pentium 4 2.8 , then this is one of the best motherboards i would recommend to get. There are lots of great advantages with this motherboard such as the size, its a Micro ATX motherboard meaning that you can have a smaller case such as a media centre case. It has 2 DDR 400 (backwards compatible with DDR 333,266 and 200) slots which can be used in Dual channel Mode if both Ram modules are the same. The northbridge chipset on this board is an Intel 865g which supports a front side bus up to 800 mhz , but you can also use 400 and 533 mhz bus CPU's with this board. It has two SATA slots which i would say is the most future friendly part on the motherboard meaning it wont be a problem when upgrading your hard drive or some optical drives which are now... Read review

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Advantages: Easy Setup, Great Performance, Cheap but Reliable
Disadvantages: Some components hard to reach

...I bought this motherboard when I was building my first ever system, mainly due to the cost but also due to it's wide range of features. On the face of it, it's nothing to shout home about, but it's reliable and should something go wrong, during installation or testing, it won't break the bank if you need to purchase another. It comes well packaged, with a fairly well laid out multilingual manual, all the cables you'll need (Floppy, SATA, IDE), the Install CD (although in my opinion it's not really needed) and even an anti-static foam mat for preparation of the board. On the whole, the board is well laid out, with the connectors for the drives grouped together and a good distance from the pci/agp slots. There are 6 USB 2.0 ports on this board, and they are connected by means of pins. There are also pins for firewire, audio... Read review

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Advantages: Still availble for the ever dwindling socket 478
Disadvantages: Not very friendly interface or screw placement

...This is a socket 478 motherboard still on sale at places like Maplins for around £60. Despite socket 478 motherboards being rare, and you'd be hard pushed to find one other than this, I would still steer way clear of this excuse for a motherboard. Upon personal experiance and purchase of this motherboard, the first, was dead on arrival, much to my dismay. I then returned this to where I purchased it, and instead of getting a refund, I got a replacement, which I imediatly regretted. The packaging may be lovley, yet the screw placement when trying to put the thing in the pc is a nightmare, with screw holes being right next to overly large capacitors, this caused no end of frustration. When I finnaly got all the screws in, along with any cables for from USB and audio getting into the BIOS became the next problem! There was no clear... Read review

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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

...and then if these are out-dated you have the very simple task of just clicking on update and your chosen driver updates are done for you with nothing else required, its extremely simple and straightforward and a massive bonus of this and other MSi motherboards to have included. The 845E max is a typical ATX motherboard and therefore will fit into most (if not all) modern desktops and the exact size dimensions are... Width 30.5 cm Depth 20 cm Heres a full list of the included supported features of this motherboard as specified by MSi themseoves on thier website... Expansion Slots Total (Free) 1 ( 1 ) x processor - Socket 478 1 ( 1 ) x AGP 4x ( 1.5 V ) 2 ( 2 ) x memory ( 2.5 V ) - DIMM 184-PIN 1 ( 1 ) x CNR 6 ( 6 ) x PCI ( 3.3 V/ 5 V ) Interfaces 1 x storage - floppy interface - 34 PIN IDC 2 x serial - RS-232 - 9 pin D-Sub (DB-9) 1... Read review

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Advantages: Many Ram slots, 800mhz FSB supported
Disadvantages: Fan on northbridge makes a lot of noise

...like a lawnmower after about 3 months of usage (before then it was unnoticable) it cost me £5 for a whopping heatsink to keep it cool with no fan. Connectors Here is a list of all sockets on this motherboard 1x Socket 478 processor 4x 184 pin DDR slots 4x PCI slots 1x AGP 8x 2x IDE 2x SATA 3x 3 pin fan connectors 1x Floppy IDE connector 2x USB headers 2x Firewire headers 1x audio header 1x HDD activity light connector 2x PS/2 connectors 1x optical in 1x optical out 3x audio out 1x line out 1x mic in 1x LAN 1x Parallel 1x serial 4x USB (not including ones on backplate) 1x Firewire (again not inclding backplate) Conclusion This has been a great motherboard with many good features i would reccomend it to anyone considering building a pc with a pentium 4 socket 478. With the only problem being a noisy NB fan... Read review

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Advantages: Inexpenisve, good performance, lots of ports and slots
Disadvantages: Ports a bit cluttered, no WiFi

...computer case, but the layout of the ports on the back, such as USB and Audio/Mic jacks is not the best. It’s very cluttered and often is a challenge to get to. My previous motherboard (also from Asus) had a similar issue and I had to make quite an effort to plug/unplug anything from the back. Other than that it’s done pretty well and everything on the actual board is color coded so that you can plug everything in quite easily, should you be upgrading or building your machine from scratch. The slots on the motherboard are: • Socket 478 (for Pentium 4 CPUs) • 4 DDR SDRAM DIMM slots • AGP 8x • 5 PCI • WiFi slot (not actually useful unless you buy the WiFi card from Asus for a lot of money) • ATX power • FDD • 2 IDE • 2 SerialATA • 2 USB 2.0 (for external wiring) • COM port • Game port • Audio/mic jacks • Ethernet • Fan controller... Read review

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