Which stable board for budget system?

I might be building a budget system for a friend and was looking for suggestions for both Athlon XP motherboards and Pentium 4 motherboards. I will be going with either an Athlon XP 2800+ or a Pentium 4 2.6GHz. There will be absolutely NO OVERCLOCKING on this computer, as I am looking for 100% stability.

I would the like the board to have one ethernet port, and onboard sound, even if it is crappy.

This machine will be used for Office applications and Internet, almost no gaming or video work will be done.


P.S. I was thinking about the asus a7n8x non-deluxe for an athlon. Does it still have one NIC (instead of 2 for the deluxe) and some sort of onboard sound (unlike the soundstorm for the deluxe).

If you decide on AMD based you should look at Shuttle MN31N, mATX nForce2 with integrated everything, can't get an easier build or better onboard audio and video for these prices. It uses GF4mx graphics, Soundstorm audio w/SPDIF support, USB2, Firewire, LAN, active NB cooling and best of all if you buy in November has $15.00 rebate from Shuttle so it ends up costing $72.00 - I built 2 of these rigs for my family using Barton 2500+ and 2 x 256mb Crucial PC2700 for each. My wife's runs stock and for my sons I OC'd FSB and IGP for 5950 3DMarks, he can play any game out there @ 1024 x 768 x 32 bit color with no issues. The IGP will support higher resolutions so since your friend isn't gaming I'm sure it will be fine. There are P4 options, I believe you want to check out Asus as they have a new board with integrated ATI Radeon 9100 IGP which should also perform admirably though more costly in system build. Welcome to the Forums!
Regards, Balrog

Thanks, that was everything i wanted to know a little more. Much appreciated.

If you do not want to OC your system, you can buy virtually any mobo. Just consider its features and price and select one which fulfills your expectations.

If you will build a P4-Celeron rig, I recommend you, to buy a mobo with cheap but good chipset SiS655, if it is available at location where do you live. It is a dual channel chipset, which helps (especially Celerons, because of its small L2 cache) boosting up the performance of P4 generation rigs. Unfortunatelly, this chipset is no more produced (it will be replaced by improved 655FX), thus mobos with it are hardly available. Here is the list of SiS655 mobos:

AOpen AX45-4D Max
Asus P4SDX
MSI 655 Max
Gigabyte SINXP, or 8SQ800

For office rigs, ECS are also good and cheap mobos, which I can strongly recommend you. There are models with integrated VGA, sound and LAN for very nice price.