looking for all-in-one motherboard

[emcron]

I'm building a computer for a friend and have very little money, so I'm looking for a motherboard that has video, sound, and modem. Any suggestions.

[Peter M]

If you have to make that as cheap as possible, then here's your shopping list:

PC-Chips M599LMR uATX board. Socket 7, includes video, sound, modem, and LAN. Or the 598LMR sibling when recycling an old BAT case.

Cyrix MII-333. Cheapest CPU around by a huge margin, slow by today's standards, but who cares. If you can, get the 433 speed grade, they're rare but almost as cheap. Use a halfway decent fan and heatsink.

64 MByte of SDRAM. Don't go below, the integrated VGA will eat some of that.

If there's money left after buying whatever else you need, spend on more RAM first before looking for faster processors.

Regards, Peter

[drn]

i must agree with Peter but i would use a k62 before i used a cyrix

[Peter M]

I'd do that too, but if your budget is extremely limited, you have to think a different route:

Any K6-2 will cost around twice as much as an MII, which means your budget (my local prices in Germany) is down DEM 90 (around US$40) for computational power you don't need ... especially if you have to shave those $40 off elsewhere. What's going to run business applications faster, an MII-333 with 60 MByte of RAM, or a K6-2/500 with 28? (Shared memory VGA eats at least 4 MByte.)

Trying to build a balanced system from minimum budget? Then Cyrix is your friend ... because that's exactly where Cyrix processors are aimed at: The absolute lowest end of the market, where even the slowest of today's processors is good enough. All it has to be is cheap and usable.

Regards, Peter

[Win_98]

Cyrix MII would only be good in motherboard that don't support K6-2. Some old board that have a 1.5, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0, 3.5 multiplier only therefore clocked at 233mhz it is just as good as P300mhz