AM2 motherboard advice

[stuart38]

Im building two machines for a friend who wants gaming systems for himself and his son.

I am leaning towards an Athlon 64 4200 Dual Core 2.2GHz 512kb L2 cache AM2, 2gb of compatible ram for each machine (probably the cheapest going), an X1800 of some variety and haven not decided on disks yet.

The problem I have is that I'm stuck when looking at motherboards - the last time I bought a full size motherboard it was the NF7s that was king and everyone including myself was able to reccomend it. Primary needs now are onboard sound and lan, decent graphics compatability - sli might be nice but not essential as I would rather spend his money on one decent graphics card - and finally something that is stable. He will not be overclocking and knows little about hardware so the more stable the board is the less hasstle for me

So whats the board of choice these days for all the AMD AM2 users out there?

 

[stuart38]

if you haven bought the parts and it isnt too late, get a conroe, much betterr value for money!

when I've looked online it seemed the intel chips were a lot more expensive than the AMD ones? Also if I was going to go the intel route - what motherboard?

 

[stuart38]

E6300 - £115 outperforms the 4600x2 - £160

Best value for money boards imo - Gigabyte.

Hmm, can you justify that comment about the gigabyte boards? It seems to me from my reading that they are very fussy about what ram they use!

I want an easy life so "stable as a table" is the name of the game not overclocking

Anymore suggestions for either AM2 or 775 boards?