Seeking guidance on a search for a new motherboard

[GSalisbury]

Perhaps someone can help steer me towards a starting point in tracking down a newer, standard-sized ATX motherboard that would be somewhat up the food chain. I presume that a motherboard, then, would dictate a processor but I can worry about that later I guess.

I have a nice case and a number of IDE & SATA and optical drives etc. that I was trying to leverage in the construction of a secondary/backup/sandbox 32-bit XP system on a Gigabyte GA-81915P Duo MB w/4G of memory and a Intel P4 something processor. The installation of XP fought me every step of the way and ultimately never succeeded. Hell it turned out that the XP install CD even had some bad spot[s] as I couldn't even make a raw copy of it. I've finally abandoned the whole XP project.

My interest now is to assemble a newer (presumably 64-bit) W7 system using as much of the stuff I already have as possible.

My primitive searches show that on-board Audio, LAN and USB and sometimes on-board Video are virtual norms anymore.
I just don't know enough in order to narrow a search to something reputable and reliable but not restrictive for the rest.

As I noted I have a couple IDE HD's, a couple of SATA HD's and some IDE optical drives.
In addition I also have a couple of PCI cards and a floppy drive that I'd like to retain, if possible, for some legacy usages.
I have a PCI IDE card, for example, that I could hang the IDE drives on while the opticals were on [a] MB connection.
I have a PCI-E (I think it is) video card but if a MB has on-board video I could easily forego the card and not look back.
The couple of 64-bit MB's I randomly viewed seemed to have reasonably generous memory capacities (I don't remember what they were - I was shot-gunning) so 8 to 16 gig or even more of memory, for all I know, may be considered normal and I’m not interested in any over-clocking.

What I'm looking for is some insight (some ideas) into what [type of] [Make/Model] motherboard I should be looking at.
A search criteria I might use to narrow the focus – limit the choices.
What should I look for? What should I avoid?
Price, while not an overwhelming consideration, would be factor but I'm not adverse to paying for quality and capability.

I realize that this is fairly open-ended but can someone recommend a board or a couple of boards I could look at that might suit my needs?

Thanks.
Geo.

[Train]

MSI and the Gigabyte are the 2 brands I buy. Prefer the MSI boards.

Now are a Intel or AMD person?

AMD boards.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...eId=1&name=MSI
8 GB of ram is overkill for what I do.

[GSalisbury]

Thank you for the Gigabyte and MSI references.
I'll drill down deeper into them as soon as I can.
I have the mentioned Gigabyte sort of by accident.
A system was given to me and I was trying to make one out of two.
I'll see if I can make sense of the Gigabyte & MSI lineups.
Thnaks.
Geo.