I am upgrading my PC to a Athlon XP 2600, with 512 mb pc2700 ddr , can someone suggest a decent Motherboard, dosent need to have onboard sound or graphics, but needs to be reliable..

will I have to get a 400w power supply or will my 300w do the job,

I will probablys be ordering the hardware from Ebuyer unless someone can suggest somewhere better i.e cheaper.

cheers

I think this is a consumer opinion mate. Personally i am a fan of the Asus boards as i find them to be very reliable. You'll need to give a bit more info then - in particular if you are intending to overclock there are some boards better than others, also regarding your power question OC'ing is a question and also how many drives you are intending to bolt on to it.

As I've said before in this forum power is a source of paranoia among pc users, but if you are running a unit with a single hard drive and a couple of CD drives then 300 is enough - that said, if you've got the money there is nothing to lose by getting 400 W.

HTH

thanks for the reply m8

I wont be overclocking but I do want a good reliable stable board which will give me no trouble,

regarding the power supply, I have two hard drives and two CD writers and am hoping to soon get a DVD writer, so I will probalys need to upgrade that.

I am going to make a system up for my son with the old board etc so will prob buy a case with a 400w power supply in and swap the psw over as i want to keep my full size tower case.

A highly rated board at the moment is the Asus A7N8 deluxe (onboard sound, lan, usb2, SATA and dual RAM support. It also supports 400mhz fsb which (I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong) at the moment the kt400 chip boards don't. It comes in at about £98.

Asus also do a lower spec A7N8X which comes a bit cheaper.

The main problem with this board is that it is fussy about the RAM and if you check around the reccomended RAM is Kingston Value.

I bought this board and bought Crucial ram which gave me problems. It's now running ok with the Kingston.

If you do decide to go down the Nforce chipset route then MSI also do a highly rated board.

Both these manufacturers also seem to offer the best in the way of overclocking options.

hi,
msi are getting a good reputation for stable reliable boards,and are good value.
i have just upgraded, and have the gigabyte 7vaxp ultra motherboard.
it's a great m/b, also has dual bios for safe future flashing of the bios.

then again i have the asus deluxe running rock solid with crucial specific ram, no problems at all, in well over 6 months.(1x 512k)
suggest 2x 256k sticks for better performance.

PSU
no paranoia about it, as soon as i moved from 1x hdd, 1x cdr/w, 1x dvd rom on a 300w standard psu, i hit the over heating/ power supply fluctuating problem and for a novice this can be a very upsetting situation(it was for me).
i would recommend at least a 400w psu for all future upgrades, if using more than 3 ide drives or not.
the heat these amd chips put out, and the heat from some of the new graphix boards is very high and has got to be got out by a couple of fans, which also add to power supply needs
i know there are some good 300w units, but not in a case for ~£30-£50.