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Anyone know of a good motherboard that can be had fairly cheap. I am looking to upgrade my computer and need a MB for an Athlon XP. I am getting a new board, processor and RAM. I want to spend about $300-$400 for everything. Any tips?

Top of the line are ASUS, ABIT, EPOX, etc.

For everythign you will probably go over budget. Look on www.pricewatch.com, the "Bargain" boards aren't bad at all. I've personally used AMPTRON, MSI, and Biostar...never had any problems. Go to www.3dcool.com and make sure you have a nice fan for that cpu of yours. I bought an orb from them 2 years back, it's still kicking and still keeping the cpu icy cold

I can recommend two lower-end motherboards: the Abit KT7-A and the Soltek SL-75KAV/-X. Both use SDRAM memory rather than the newer, faster, DDR RAM, so it's your call on what you want to spend. My son has the Abit in his 1.2 gig Athlon machine; I have the Soltek in my 1.33 gig Athlon machine (on which I'm typing this). We put both together this year. Unless you're into very serious gaming, either should be sufficient, just get plenty of memory (we have 384 megs). I think I paid about $65 for the Soltek, $70 for the Athlon (remember to get a good heatsink fan for any Athlon), $70 for the memory...so you can keep the costs way down if you work at it a little.

ECS K7S5A

Have one running a 1.2Duron and no issues. Board can easily overclock your chip and has some nice features.

4Dimm slots 2 for PC133 and 2 for DDR
5PCI
Onboard sound and LAN

Should be had for around $50

They sell this board and 1.7+ XP's for $119-$129 at my local Frys when they go on special.

EPoX EP-8KHA+ $92.00
Athlon XP 1900 $117
crucial 256mb DDR ram $60x2
Thermaltake volcano 7 $15

$344 plus shipping. You might want to consider getting a new power supply at the same time....trust me

-Pete

K7S5A and K7S6A should both be fine and are very cheap. They are both from ECS. I've used on with a Duron 800 and on with an XP 1600+ and they're both pretty stable. Not as stable as my MSI board but still good for the money.

www.newegg.com Look into the MSI motherboards.

No problem! Top of the line motherboard $140 to $160 AMD XP 1900 $110 Memory PC2100 256MB name brand $50 to $60. Check out Anandtech or sharkyextreme for reviews on motherboards and just about anything else you want to know. And when you decide on a MB go to the manufacturer's web site and check on what brand of memory the recomend. Some motherboard's don't like some brands of memory. i.e Asus and Micron
With that kind of budget your in plenty good shape! Also check out the hot deals forum on Anandtech. You can pick some great deals off that sometimes!

Ditto! have had one for over a year running a 1200 athlon at 1256MHz(fastest I could go and still boot)using a updated bios.Runs great every day!

By the way got mine with processor and Volcano for $155!Then gotr the 512MB DDR for $71 shipped from Crucial.That was back when memory was cheap!