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"A Motherboard Bundle"

My brother has an old computer (running on a PII) he wants to upgrade and since he's no whizz (bless him) he's looking at a motherboard bundle as the most easiest and cheapest way of upgrading. Since I'm also pretty inept when it comes to upgrading, I'd like some opinions from those on here as to what they think and whether it'll actually work or not...

Basically, he want's this:

[URL]http://uk.special.reserve.co.uk/q_GG1618_pc_chips_motherboa.html[/URL]

The board relies on shared graphics (64Mb) so he's going to buy 128mb of DDR RAM (PC2100) which he's then going to add to the older RAM from the PII machine (64Mb SDRAM PC100). But will this actually work? Or will the board implode in a flash of green neon lightening killing us both in the process....etc..?

Aside from the RAM issue, will their be any problems connecting the old hard drive to the new motherboard?

Cheers.

Mine became a router :-)

You can use the p2 PC For other purpoes, like fie servers, backuo ir thin clients. Too many people thrown away their perfectly good PCS.

Not that Asus every make anything really decent, but Asrock do tend to get pretty good murmurs. Not a patch on PC Chips, anyway. I have to say this is not an amazing motherboard though, never really making it past "alright". But, you pay for what you get.

Yes Dig, the fountain of all trustworthy knowledge.

In my experience, and others, Asrock BEING PART OF ASUS tend to be pretty decent.

To clarify, Asrock are not owned by Asus, but are a Chinese puppet corporation that Asus control and use for making their boards. Just in case you wanted to get smart.

AHHHHHHHHH Pc chips and ad rock, the 2 worst makes you could chose, go to , im supprised that special reserve sell such rubbish, buy it if you want it to explode( also avoid Q-tec psus), by a major brad, like asus, epox, msi etc

I was shocked how good they were for the money. It even has a decent northbridge heatsink, that I'm considering attaching to my NF7-S southbridge.

I noticed an Asrock on ebay.

EDIT: Yep "ASROCK K7S41 Micro ATX Motherboard" at £20.

For a Micro ATX board go for the Asrock K7S41. It is socket A. Will do 200 MHz FSB and supports multiplier adjustment etc, so it can overclock a bit. I have one in a spare machine, coupled with a 1.6 GHz Duron and 512 Mb of PC3200 RAM. Runs like a dream. Onboard sound and graphics, although it also has an AGP 8x slot.

Board costs £31. [URL]http://worldofcomputers.uk.com/amdmboards.htm[/URL].
A 1.8 GHz Duron costs £29.

£45 for 512 MB of PC2700 or DDR 333 RAM.

Total cost £105. It really is a great board.

Ahhh, no AGP - the thing about the motherboard my brother wants is that if he manages to pick up a dedicated card on the cheap he has the option there.

Starting at a quid though, you can't go wrong by bidding on that Gigabyte board. Shame he's a bit skeptical about using ebay.

[URL]http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=67866&item=6700769400&rd=1[/URL]

That looks ok, Gigabyte are a solid enough brand, crap overclockers, but that doesnt matter anyway. The only real problem i see is lack of an AGP port, it has integrated intel extreme graphics, but it doesnt say how much memory it can allocate to graphics.