Buying a new APG graphics card would have been kind of stupid,I’d just have wasted a lot of money on a card that I could not use with any decent motherboard later. So what the hell, lets buy a new motherboard. Oh wait, my old AMD processor will need a socket 754 motherboard. No way, I’m not going to buy a new ancient system. Wait another sec, my memory won’t be compatible either… It’s not easy to upgrade a system that is friggin three years old! The situation would be slightly better had I three years ago invested in a socket 939, but only slightly I guess.

Anyway, I decided to go for a budget motherboard with an integrated GPU. I chose the Asus M2N-MX, only 58€ @ verkosta.fi, which fared well in hintaseuranta, and they had it in stock. Newegg reviews for this board are spot on – it’s good value for your money, it comes with everything you need, but it’s got some minor problems, such as:

• Very confusing labeling for DIMM slots, but OK if you read the manual carefully.
• No locking clip for the heat sink’s retention bracket lock to clip into – but IMHO who needs that anyway? The heat sink will stay on just fine without it.
• “No mounting points near where the power cable and PATA cable plugs into the motherboard. Plugging and un-plugging those into the board causes it to flex more than I am comfortable with.” – nc3d – I could not agree more, plugging in the power and PATA cables is pretty scary with this one.

I found a couple of additional problems:

There’s no PC-speaker on the mobo! How will I be able to play Space Invaders?!?

There was a really ugly white scratch on my southbridge heat sink. Overall the product does not look very polished…

Some more pics:

If you need more connectors than this, buy another motherboard. With the M2N-MX you get no DVI, IEEE 1394, S/PDIF… just the basics. <sarcasm>Serial port is there, which is all I need</sarcasm>.

The accessories are pretty basic too, nothing fancy, just the absolute necessities. There was a case sticker, which was nice

Here’s my AMD 64 X2 3800+ processor, not the fastest thing on the planet, but a great budget product. Got it for 66€ from Mikromaja, apparently the cheapest in Finland. Also bought some cheap memory from verkkokauppa.com. Here’s my updated machine:

Pretty leds all-over the case… Notice how the micro-ATX board is just ridiculously small for my huge case.

Everything works just fine for me with the Asus M2N-MX. Installing Ubuntu 7.04 was a breeze, although there were some problems with X settings after installing the proprietary Nvidia drivers, but not a big deal. More on that later, if I bother…