Budget motherboard with nice graphics

Take a look at this motherboard...what do you guys think of it? And i would say the graphics are nice as well for integrated. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813139147

 

For the price i would say it's very good for a budget motherboard.

 

yea that is a good price, as far as the integrated graphics, I own a 9200 and I can say it runs most games just fine at lower resolutions with pretty good detail, just not hardcore or nothing. but still will run half life 2 fine, ut2004 got me 99 fps, aquamark score of around 36000 with a 2.8 p4 socket 478. just couldn't get doom 3 to run smooth. far cry was ok at 800x600 though. so yea for that price it's a good deal.

 

Nice i got pretty much the same setup as you, 2.8Ghz Celeron D socket 478 as well, but i only got 512MB ram. Its good to hear that it can run games like UT2004 and Far Cry.

 

yea with ram as cheap as it is nowadays I would consider buying anothe 512 to stick in there.

 

Whoa wait...would i need to like reformat my hard drive and re-install windows xp if i get a new motherboard??? I think somewhere i saw that you could "repair windows" after installing new motherboard? how does the whole process go???

 

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

this link takes you step by step.

 

Aight thanks for the link techguy...and thats all you need to do after installing a new motherboard right?

 

also follow this guide so you wont have to worry with reactivation

http://aumha.org/win5/a/wpa.htm

 

hehe its alright...i got xp corporate, no activation necessary

 

ok fine then best thing I would do is do a complete system backup and then reformat and reinstall. for a nice clean fresh feeling. lol

 

ok what do you mean by backup...back it up to a hard drive and reformat? i only got one hard drive. And would all my programs like games and stuff be gone?

 

do a complete backup to dvd. but you really dont have to just repair if you don't want to backup.

 

Well i dont have a dvd burner, but i guess i could backup to like 6 cd's, but all my games would be gone right? and if I repair, the games and all my other apps would not get erased would they?

 

if you repair everything will be the same, and without a dvd burner I'd reccommend doing that first.

 

oh cool, then i will just do repair. Thanks for the help!

 

no problem let me know how it goes!

 

Alright well I finally got the motherboard installed, and let me tell you, it was a total pain in the a$$. The integrated Radeon 9200 Graphics chipset kicks a$$(compared to my old Intel 845G Chipset), the c-media sound is great too, But i did have problems with the power led, hdd led, and power connector thing. My comp has all of them combined into one, and the mobo has them to plug in seperately, so my LED's dont work now(a shame, they were cool). I also had to reformat my hard drive, cause when I tried to upgrade my system, I kept on getting errors. It was weird, the integrated lan chipset is way better than my old one, BitTorrent downloads speeds have increased dramatically. Other than that, the mobo is very nice.

Oh yeah heres the best part...theres no cpu sensor, i cant tell the temp of my cpu, only my hdd. Whats up with that?

 

Oh yeah i was also gonna overclock my RAM...I was wondering by how much should I increase it?...It goes by 5...(+5Mhz, +10Mhz....and so on)