The AK32L showed good workmanship and versatility. It’ll work with PC133 or DDR and any current AMD CPU. It’s not a performance board per se, but it’s no slouch and it’s nice to be able to get a board that’ll take your old stuff and let you upgrade to new stuff later. The BIOS had lots of little tweaker settings to play with, and yeah, I was able to make the system really unstable by getting too aggressive with them. 🙂

Darn! No way I’m going to run XP on what will basically be an MP3 storage and playback “appliance,” and BeOS (while an excellent choice for such a thing) has no drivers for modern chipsets at all…

Now you know my name. 🙂

For cheap and integrated, nothing beats the despised PC Chips m810 LMR. If you can find a non-PC Chips alternative, all the better.

Bonus: all the Linux drivers are easily available. Even for the AMR winmodem.

The nForce does sound good. Wish they sold those in Trinidad. I’d snap one up in a heartbeat.

ALSO !!!- I found a pretty cool Black case that has two slot covers included for cdrw and cdrom or dvd so that you can use beige or white drives and this covers them up so it all looks black(you press the button and the drive opens and flips down the cover).. You dont have to spend the extra $10-$20 on each part to make it look the same color. I thought it was very cool . THey come without power supplies and I sell them at $40. If you have a power supply just stick it in or I sell AMD/Intel approved 300 watt PS for $25. We also have black keyboard and mouse Cheap..Cheap.. FUN.. FUN

If anyone is interested , I can reply. Its not on my website currently but we are going to put them up.. PS. I have about 10 black monitors we mistakenly ordered thats why we got the black cases etc..

Yesterday, the Foxconn page at Newegg had what looked like a black version of the case you reviewed for just a dollar or two more…

Yeah, I looked at Newegg and found the Asus A7N266-VM NVIDIA nFORCE 220 Chipset Motherboard for $69.00. Not exactly the cheapest, but then again you don’t need a separate video & sound cards, either. (BTW, I was only thinking of an MP3 server, already have two DVD players in the house 😉

As far as an inexpensive mobo, a first-generation nForce board would do nicely and they’re cheap for what you get. I think an Asus will run you under $75 at Newegg.

I picked up a low-end Shuttle ATX board for this box. I think it ran $55. The built-in sound is nothing special, but it takes either PC133 or DDR, and in combination with a Sapphire Radeon 7000 card with S-Video and composite out ($36, same place) it’ll yield a pretty sweet system with good upgrade potential. The S-Video and composite video will be good for an entertainment center PC. Now that I’ve seen the card in action I’m tempted to do a living-room PC myself. I’d kinda like to find a black or silver desktop-style case for that though, so it’ll blend in.

For good sound, you can pick up an OEM SoundBlaster Live! cheap. They go for $25 or less these days, I think.

I’ll probably do writeups on some of the other components I’m playing with. Might as well, eh? Especially the video card.