I bought this motherboard for a friend because he wanted a computer to do word processing, regular applications, surf the internet and maybe play some games. Because playing games was not a big factor this motherboard worked out great for him. For only $82 from Directron he got a socket A DDR motherboard with onboard sound, video, LAN and that has 3 PCI slots and an AGP slot so that if games did become something he wanted to do then he could always buy a better video card and disable the onboard video.
Overclocking for this motherboard was not really a factor either, there was no need to make it go any faster for him and the motherboard had no options to do any overclocking so that would be something you need to think about if you are looking at this motherboard.
Conclusion
I really like this motherboard a lot because of all that it has to offer, this is the first time I have used a nForce board and I have wanted to for a long time because I wanted to see how it would really perform. This motherboard is a great motherboard for those who don’t need a super fast high end computer or those wanting to build computers for people at a low cost which the nForce was intended to do. For a price of $82 you really cant complain much about this board with all that it has to offer.
There are some things that were kind of a disappointment however, I would have like to have seen some overclocking features in the BIOS and the onboard video is not the best especially for newer games. I also thought the documentation could have been a lot better than it was because it was pretty hard to find what I was looking for while I was testing.
I like that you get a lot of extras with the motherboard like the extra serial port, the extra USB ports, and the SPDIF connection so you can push this motherboard to its limit. I am going to give this motherboard a 7/10 and even though the score isn’t the highest I am going to give it the OCmodshop seal of approval because it has earned it in my opinion.
Pros
- Great price, only $82
- Has onboard video, audio, and LAN
- MicroATX design
- Lots of extras included
Cons
- Onboard video not the best
- Not good for overclockers
- Poor documentation
