I get asked to look at a lot of PCs by friends/family/work colleagues and I'm starting to get tired of having to take the side off my main PC in order to test various components. I'm also worried about the wear and damage constantly disconnecting & reconnecting components will eventually cause to my top spec ASUS mobo & Antec Case. What I intend to do is mount a motherboard on a cut out side of an old case as a test rig. But what I need first is a decent mobo that can stand up to a lot of physical abuse (constant plugging/unplugging of ports and cards). It also needs to have a wide range of connectors (IDE,SATA,PCI,PCI-E,USB,etc...). Finally I don't mind AMD or Intel and don't mind buying second hand. Anyone have any suggestions?
Pretty much anything around the £50-60 mark should suit what you need it for.CPU wise something like the AMD x2 240 would do. It's not like you need a power house set up just for testing components, unless you're planning on doing a load of bench marking and a 500w PSU to power it all up.all pretty basic stuff really.
That was more or less what I was thinking, are there any particular brands of board that tend to be less/more well built? I do like Asus boards but I've had a graphics card slot come loose on one before so wasn't sure whether this was common on Asus boards or me just being unlucky?
what are you going to be testing on the setup, just HDD or will it be Ram ect. beacuse this may affect the choice of components such as DDR2 or DDR3 ram to test
I'd say you're just unlucky.I'm not to gentle with mine and never had any probs, the other choices I would go for would be gigbyte or MSI. Like deathtaker says the only other consideration is for ram .The thing is, if you wanted to cover all the different sockets you'd end up with about 6 test rigs, which is'nt to practical unless it's what you do for a living.
Lol, it's getting to be that way, I'm probably gonna get a middle range Asus board with DDR2 slots for now then. Thanks for the advice guys.
