I wouldn't worry about the asrock board - they actually make pretty good boards and this new one seems to be no exception.
If you want to go for something by one of the main brands then
this ASUS is £15 more - and for that money you don't get much more than the name.
That was my thinking too - a CPU like a sandy bridge quad is so powerful that it should deal with tasks for years before it needs an upgrade.
The way these modern Intel CPU/boards work is that the graphics chip is only on the CPU (no graphic chip on the board at all) - the motherboard just accesses this and allows it to work.
You can also plug in a discrete graphics card into the board (at some point in the future perhaps) and this will automatically disable the onboard graphics chip - so the discrete graphics card becomes the primary graphics processor.
Well with modern mainstream Intel CPUs, both the previous gen s1156 nahalem i3/i5s and sandy bridge s1155 CPUs come with both a CPU die and a GPU die on the chip. These GPUs are intel HD and not particularly powerful compared to proper graphics cards - but if you don't do much gaming then they are ideal as they come free with the CPU. The i5 2300 has a graphics processor of comparable speed to the chip on the top-end nahalem i5s, which is a bit faster than the one on the i3 540.
If you look at
this page the sandy bridge i3 2100 is using the same HD 2000 graphics processor as the i5 2300 - so you can get an idea of how this CPU will perform in a range of games. Also, that review shows the performance of the 890GX - the top-end AMD integrated graphics, which the HD 2000 tends to either match or beat. Therefore cheaper AMD integrated graphics (eg. 740G, 760G, 880G) can be expected to perform worse than this.
It is also more than powerful enough to decode 1080p video, which is always nice.
Also, if she does any video transcoding with H.264 then the new Intel Quick Sync Technology offered by the sandy bridge CPU is very powerful, have a look at
this review.
Unfortunately the H67 chipset does not support overclocking. To do this you need a P67 board - but these don't support the integrated graphics, so you need to buy a discrete graphics card. Anyway, the i5 2300 is not an unlocked CPU - so you can't overclock it very far even on a P67 board.
Even the sandy bridge CPUs are rated to only 1333MHz memory. However, this does not mean this is the limit - as before.
Again, I would suggest buying the cheap 1600MHz RAM and run it at stock speeds. This will overclock the memory controller slightly - but the H67 can do this.
Indeed I did - you could change that back to a Samsung for £5, but the OCUK one is a perfectly good drive.
Indeed - as I mentioned above.
However, bear this in mind: Even when not overclocked the i5 2300 will perform better than the mighty i7 920 (as it is clocked higher and performs ~15% faster clock-for-clock). So it is
significantly faster than an i3 540 or an Athlon II X4.
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