Favorite motherboard with onboard video?

[ddrueding]

It's really crazy for me to still be using add-on video for basic office machines and low-end servers. What do you guys use? S939 is preferred, but A64 is a must. DVI is preferred, but VGA will do.

TIA

 

[Mercutio]

The Gigabyte K8VM800M is a wonderful, beautiful thing. It's socket 754. I don't think that's in any way a drawback. It's all those happy Via things. Stable. Predictable. Boring. I use them all the time and I do so without apology or reservation.

My second choice, oddly enough, is the Biostar board with the same system chipset.

 

[ddrueding]

The Gigabyte K8VM800M is a wonderful, beautiful thing. It's socket 754. I don't think that's in any way a drawback. It's all those happy Via things. Stable. Predictable. Boring. I use them all the time and I do so without apology or reservation.

My second choice, oddly enough, is the Biostar board with the same system chipset.

Thanks Merc, I'd been looking at that and some other boards on Newegg. All of them seemed to have complaints in the customer feedback. I know they are unqualified whining, but they scared me a bit nonetheless. As I'll be building about 15 systems all at the same time, a bad choice would be really bad.

 

[ddrueding]

One question: Is a floppy disk required to install the OS onto a SATA drive?

 

[ddrueding]

System build:

Gigabyte GA-K8VM800M
AMD Sempron 64 3300+
BUFFALO 1GB PC 3200
Seagate 7200.7 80GB SATA
Antec SLK1650B w/350W PS
LITE-ON SHW-160P6S DVD-RW

Right now $399.42 at Newegg.

I keep looking over the build thinking I must be missing something. This is a pretty tight little box that I can have with an OEM XP Pro licence for $550. With a small (volume) margin for $700 a piece. I'm now competitve with Dell. Yay.

 

[Mercutio]

Yes, you would need an OS to install from SATA.
However, if you ask me really nicely I can help you out with that. Sysprep is a beautiful thing.

 

[Sol]

If your building 15 it would be worth grabbing nlite and createing a slipstreamed XP install disk. That way you can add the sata drivers to it, avoiding the need for a floppy drive, and also include all the latest security updates.

 

[Tannin]

The Gigabyte K8VM800M is a wonderful, beautiful thing. It's socket 754. It's all those happy Via things. Stable. Predictable. Boring. I use them all the time and I do so without apology or reservation.

That one would be my seond choice after, of all things, the Gigabyte Nforce III chipset all-in-one board. Costs just a few dollars more. Never thought I'd see he day when I would actually prefer an Nfoce chipset board to a VIA one, but there you go. Mind you, the differences are trivial, so much so that I don't trouble to specify which one on my purchase orders, just take whichever of the two they happen to ship. Both are excellent.

Can't remember if I've tried the Biostar one or not. Oh yes, we used a half-dozen of them a while back and, as expected, they were so simple and fuss-free that I forgot all about them already.

I have never yet used a Socket 939 board all-in-one. Seems like too much of a waste of a great CPU. But that will change soon enough. One imagines that the Semprons will give way to a 939-based chip soon enough. And that, despite the fact that Semprons and Sempron boards are excellent, will be a very good thing. I'm sick and tired of having to carry so many different boards in stock.

At one stage not too long ago we had five - Socket A with and without video, Socket 745 with and without, and 939 without. Currently we are down to four: Socket 754 wih and without, and 939 in AGP and PCI-E. Roll on the S-939 Sempron!

 

[Tannin]

PS: I think it is a very bad idea to build systems that you can't reinstall on without special tools or drivers. Unprofessional, in my view. If your motherboards don't support native SATA, don't use a SATA boot drive, use PATA. (Or a different motherboard, as you please.)

 

[Handruin]

I'll put in another good word for the K8VM800M. Merc suggested it to me a while back and I've since built 3 systems with it ussing semprons. I did have trouble with one of the boards hanging on reboot, but I RMA'ed it and the new one was fine.

Also, I faintly remember being able to load XP without a driver. If you set the SATA boot option in the BIOS, it worked...so I thought.

 

[time]

That one would be my seond choice after, of all things, the Gigabyte Nforce III chipset all-in-one board.

You can still get these? What sort of graphics chip did they use?

 

[Mercutio]

Sol, adding drivers to an nLite slipstream is the thing that caused nLite to fail spectacularly for me. Is that something you've actually done and gotten to work?

Anywhoo, I think sysprep (rather than a custom Windows disc) is the way to go regardless. ddrueding is making 15 identical computers, so handing his client three or four sets of DVD-Rs with their whole work environment already configured and just a couple keystrokes away is a pretty big win in the final presentation of the job.

Well, my customers usually think so, anyway.

 

[LiamC]

One question: Is a floppy disk required to install the OS onto a SATA drive?

I just built a S939 Gigabyte NF4 board (K8NF) with Maxtor SATA drive. I did not need floppy/special drivers/special builds.

I think Tannin or someone mentioned that NVIDIA and Intel SATA don't need special drivers but that others do.

 

[Tannin]

Seem to be finished now, Time, at least we always seem to get the VIA ones now. Nvidia graphics, natch. Don't know the details. Don't care: they worked fine and that's all that matters to me. One of the few on-board chipsets that can cut it at 1280 x 1024, but no DVI, of course.

Gigabyte may well be still making them, just not bothring with the Oz market anymore. Haven't checked.

 

[Mercutio]

Intel and nVidia right now both have northbridge-native SATA controllers that need no special Windows drivers. Everyone else (Via, SiS, ATI) uses an external chip for which drivers must be loaded under Windows.

 

[time]

Ddrueding, there's an Asus S939 board with integrated nVidia 6100 graphics that includes a DVI connector. It's the only one I've seen.

 

[time]

Although the requirement here is only for office machines, I'd just like to highlight how incredibly poor the S3 graphics that VIA provides is.

At a site I was working at, I was introduced to Wolfenstein 3D Enemy Territory, an open source multiplayer game that runs on low-end office hardware such as Dell pizza boxes. It's good fun, so I installed it on a couple of PCs at home. One of them has VIA UniChrome integrated graphics, which is probably the slowest graphics core you can currently get (even SiS is considered faster).

I couldn't run the game at all. Several drivers later, from both the motherboard manufacturer and VIA, it still wouldn't run.

I 'upgraded' to a TNT Vanta (who remembers these lowest of the low graphics cards from six years ago?). It worked fine and I thought the graphics also seemed faster (can't remember whether I benchmarked it).

The GF4MX graphics on nForce1 boards absolutely destroyed this S3 crap. The new nVidia 6100 integrated boards are so far ahead that it's impossible to take the VIA solution seriously - unless it's drastically cheaper.

 

[CougTek]

There are others too Time. The board you're talking about doesn't use the 6100 chipset, but the 6150. It's the Asus A8N-VM/CSN. The Asus A8N-VM (the one with the Geforce 6100 chipset) only has a VGA output.

MSI's K8NGM2-FID uses the Gefarce 6150 chipset too and features a DVI output.

There's also the MSI RS482M4-ILD, which uses the ATI RS482 north bridge, but unfortunately also the ATI SB450 south bridge.

GigaByte's mainboards with integrated graphics, no matter what chipset they are based on (Geforce 6150, Geforce 6100, ATI RS480, VIA KM800 and even some SiS abobination), are all deprived of a DVI output. Same thing for DFI.

I refuse to check if that's the case with ECS.

I'm not awared of any s754 board with a DVI output.


I agree with Time that VIA's integrated chipsets don't look good compared to the newer Geforce 6100/6150. I would add that the ATI RS482 also kicks KM800's ass regarding features.

 

[Mercutio]

Although the requirement here is only for office machines, I'd just like to highlight how incredibly poor the S3 graphics that VIA provides is.

Er....

Who cares? "Unichrome" is pretty much a Savage4 chip, which is IIRC DirectX6 hardware (that'd be... 1999 or so?)
But so what? The VGA out is perfectly good up to 1280x1024, which is about all I would ever expect out of a low-end business machine or for that matter all most business users would want (this after having to explain to a client that the reason his 21" LCD looks like crap is that he won't run it in its native 1600x1200, about six diferent times), and, seriously, I can't think of anything a business user would be doing that would necessitate better directX support, unless Media Player Visualizations are a business application all of a sudden.

 

[Santilli]

DD
No, it's not.

Motherboard connections to monitors are a major physical problem, and, when the connection goes south, end motherboard, and major expense.

Motherboard plus video card is a better solution...

GS

 

[Mercutio]

Sigh.

Video cards are an obnoxious expense in a lot of computers, too.
Look at what the cheapest cards you can get actually ARE.

S3 ProSavage for $15? ATI Rage 128 or TNT Vanta for $20? Radeon 7000 for $30. Is that hardware you actually want to install?

Boards with integrated video essentially cost $0 more than boards without.
If you're on a budget-conscious project, 15 $30 video cards represent 1. an erosion of your profit margin with no gain to you, 2. No gain in practical functionality for the user (OK, I guess if they needed DVI, but the very cheapest cards still don't have that) and 3. No particular gain in reliability, given that pretty much every other component is built into the board anyway. If your motherboard fails and your videocard is still working, what did you get out of having the separate video card, exactly?

I will draw the line at not using boards that don't have an AGP slot (well, or PCI-e), but I can count the number of times someone has asked me to upgrade the video hardware on their integrated-video motherboard on one finger.

 

[Handruin]

I have to agree with Merc, the Unichrome is acceptable for 2D office use up to 1280x1024, that's what I've used in a couple of the installs. 3D games...forget it, they look like ass. I installed warcraft III just to see what would happen and it worked, but it looked terrible. For a home or office machine, the integrated graphics are acceptable.

 

[Buck]

I will definitely put in a vote for the GA-K8VM800M motherboard. Great board, easy to use, stable and reliable. Plug in a SATA drive, change the SATA setting in the BIOS from RAID to IDE, and you're ready to install, no drivers needed. However, as I am not a fan of integrated graphics, I usually supplement this board with an AGP 8x card, such as the nVidia FX5200 or ATI 9250.

 

[Handruin]

Also, I faintly remember being able to load XP without a driver. If you set the SATA boot option in the BIOS, it worked...so I thought.

Plug in a SATA drive, change the SATA setting in the BIOS from RAID to IDE, and you're ready to install, no drivers needed.

Thanks Buck, that's the setting I was talking about. I thought it had the ability to install XP without the driver.

 

[ddrueding]

Thanks for all the info guys, I think this has beena very informitive thread. I think I'll be going with my build quoted earlier for this project, but look into CougTek's A8N-VM/CSN on higher-end builds.

 

[Sol]

Sol, adding drivers to an nLite slipstream is the thing that caused nLite to fail spectacularly for me. Is that something you've actually done and gotten to work?

Yeah I've put all sorts of drivers on without any problems, although in hind sight I'd stay away from video card drivers. If you add drivers then Windows treats them like it's native drivers, uninstall your current Catalyst drivers to install the newest ones and Windows will install the one you put on the CD again, so all the old versions of the files you just deleted are back... Very annoying, you just have to do an install over the top and hope it works.

SATA drivers haven't been a problem though, nLite detects that the driver might be needed at install time and asks if you would like it to be available then and windows setup just detects the drive... But maybe that's just the luck of the chipsets I've used. Like Tony I generally prefer to just install onto a PATA drive and have SATA for data.

My only real problems with nLite have been when I've removed most of the non OS rubbish i.e the winXP pro cd with SP2 ends up smaller than just the SP2 installer. And even then I only really had problems with microsoft stuff and programs which assumed that media player and IE would be there and tried to use them, which as far as I'm concerned is the programs fault...

 

[ddrueding]

It's the Asus A8N-VM/CSN.

For the record, I bought one of these and it won't POST. It boots all the way through sucessfully testing RAM and detecting the drives, then sits right there. Not frozen, numlock still responds and Alt-Crtl-Del will reboot it...right back to the same spot.

Stupid ASUS...Stupid, Stupid Dave.

Help?

 

[Mercutio]

Don't buy Asus.

No need to thank me, sir, I'm just doing my job.

 

[ddrueding]

Found it. Apparently the people who set the BIOS defaults thought that people who buy a budget integrated mobo would be using ECC ram exclusively :roll:

Buried 3-layers deep in the BIOS...bastards.

 

[CougTek]

So now it works? Update the BIOS immediately to the latest version. Asus boards are almost always shaky with the early BIOS they come with. Later revisions are always way better.

 

[ddrueding]

Yep, it's working just fine. I will be updating the BIOS as soon as I get the system on the network (actually an out of CAT5 cables...crazy).

 

[ddrueding]

Finally got around to updating the BIOS on this thing. It has been rock-solid, so this was my first chance to crack the machine (adding more optical drives).

As a matter of fact, they have a new BIOS dated 4/27/2006 for those using this hardware.