I need a good, solid Pentium 3 motherboard. I'm willing to pay a little extra. What brands do you recommend and what ones should I avoid like the plague? Thanks ahead of time.

I like Asus motherboards.

Mark

Avoid anything with a "VIA Chipset". Thoes boards dont play well with others.

If you are going with a Pent 3 , why not go with an Intel Mother board.If you have the money try an Intel 840. It will work with a pent 3 or Xeon chip,will support dual cpu's , will support 8 GIGS of system memory, as well as haveing direct pipelines for audio and video transmitions..

on the other end there is the Intel 810. It works with the pent 2 and 3, only supports 1 cpu, has a max supported memory of 512megs and doesnt have the bandwith to run high powered AGP cards to their fullest ability.IE , your GeForce4 wont run as well as it could, but it will still work.

[ 10-07-2002, 08:47 PM: Message edited by: The Hunter of Jahanna ]

<font color="#ffffcc">The ABIT SA6-R has servedme well for quite a while now. And is not that expensive these days.

Mark is right about Asus too, I have one of each [img]smile.gif[/img] </font>

[ 10-07-2002, 08:49 PM: Message edited by: MagiK ]

I'm using an ABIT BH6 II, it's about 3.5 years old, and I've never had a problem with it either in reliability or driver/hardware conflicts. Not that I don't drool over the new P4 systems, but this old one is pretty good. You might check Anandtech.com for recommendations, too.

Thanks to everyone who has responded. What are some good, RESPONSIBLE online stores that you would recommend?

www.newegg.com is the best that I've used. Good prices, good service, and inexpensive shipping.

Mark

Unless I had a PIII chip to hand, I would consider moving up to an athlonXP chip. It shoudnt be that much more expensive (if at all) and its more powerful.

Or a celeron 1.7Ghz which runs on the P4 core and is (almost) competitive against the athlonXP.

Well here is the reason I need a P3 board. A person that I thought I could trust put together a P3 system for me almost 3 years ago. Between then and now he has dropped off the face of the earth. As time went I was having more and more problems. Another friend, who is a Microsoft Certified Technician, checked out my system and here is what he found:

1. My harddrive was configured wrong and

2. Instead of using a P3 board, he used a P2 board with an adapter. All this time I have not been getting the full use of my CPU. Its been bottled necked.

My plan is to make my current system right and give it to my wife (who is a teacher) and my children for study, online access, school work, etc. I'm the PC gamer in the family. The games they play don't need anything more than a P3. I'll be getting a P4 as soon as I get my current rig up to correct specs. That is why I asked the make of P3 motherboards you would recommend.

www.newegg.com is the best that I've used. Good prices, good service, and inexpensive shipping.

Mark</font>[/QUOTE]Make that two votes for Newegg. They rock.