This motherboard has a very small foot print with its on board video and on board 5.1 sound. I wouldn't recommend this mother board to someone wanting to build a fancy gaming system but with the ability to up grade up to a quad core machine and being able to add your own PCI-e video card and your sound card it is good enough to meet any need you might have for desk top publishing and heavy duty graphics. It is what you could call a low end motherboard with very high end features. I think that is important to all of us. Getting more for the dollar spent these days.
Great things about this motherboard, and why I bought it: - Inexpensive. - Good support for older components allows a cheaper, easier upgrade path. You can keep your old IDE hard drive and DVD-RW and swap them out with shiny new SATA drives later. You can also dump the AGP and use the integrated VGA until you can afford that wizbang PCI-E video card you've been lusting for. It even has PS/2 ports for your old mouse and keyboard, in case you're an old fuddy-duddy like me. - Most everything you need is built-in, like a network port, VGA video, Hi-Def sound, RAID, and 4 USB ports. - It has 1 more PCI slot than most other motherboards with the same chipset (I'm looking at YOU, BIOSTAR!). Things that weren't so great: - Under certain circumstances right after assembly, Windows XP will not boot, not even into Safe Mode. I don't know if this is true for any other upgrade path, but when I tried to install any hard drive (IDE or SATA!) that had been previously used on a Socket 7 VIA chipset motherboard, this motherboard would get to the Windows splash screen and progress bar, then immediately reboot. It would do this forever, in an infinite loop. I solved the problem by booting from my Windows XP CD and performing a Repair Install. After that, it worked like a dream. - There is only 1 IDE connection on the motherboard, so you can only get 2 IDE devices to work on it. That wasn't that much of a problem for me, but if you have 3 or more IDE devices you absolutely need to use, you'll have to spend some more money on either a replacement device or an adapter.Read full review
I was amazed to find this technology is still around to tell you the truth. I did an upgrade on a pc for a friend of mine who's computer was quite dated. This motherboard worked with his CPU and the FSB was way faster than the MB he had. It also allowed for much more RAM at a faster clock speed (800MhZ, the fastest DDR2 RAM available). Also, I was surprised to see support for SATA and IDE hard drives. To sum it all up, I was very happy when I installed this motherboard and my friend was very happy to have a computer that he could actually use again.
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
This board works great running Windows 8 I downloaded tunein radio listen to online radio from Lagos and Rwanda great buy
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
This was an economical replacement for a Compaq Presario SR2013WM tower. Even the pinouts for the front panel header were a match to the case plug. I own several computers with various MSI motherboards and have built literally hundreds more, and have found MSI to be a reliable board manufacturer. I recommend this particular motherboard for anyone seeking a low cost alternative replacement board for mass produced name brand computers such as HP, Compaq, and others that require the specifications that this board has.
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