Hardware Super-budget Intel motherboards

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2012/11/20/budget-intel-motherboards/1

 

I just slapped a £35 Gigabyte 1155 motherboard in my housemates computer. Frankly it's great - room to upgrade to a 2500K and a GTX 680 in future too!

 

its so funny seeing an h61 paired with a GTX 680!

you should have stuck an i3 2100 as well just for giggles.

 

I made an ITX rig for my wife's parents using the MSI H61I-E35. Great deal for the price .

On the pics, yours seams to have an opened PCIe-1X slot, while mine is closed. Did you mod it to plug PCIe-4/8/16X cards ?

 

Hmmm considering the title I thought this review would include a number of budget board from various board manufacturers with specific emphasis being put on the features (or lack there of). Essentially a nice "round-up" if you will.

Instead its just a look at two under featured boards put through the normal tests.

 

No digital video output? Oh wow... I know cheap stuff is cheap, but that's not the place to save the two bucks in!

 

Shows that the difference between even the most expensive board and the cheapest is a mere 300 points. People who don't need bleeding edge performance could save alot of cash it would seem on a low end board.

 

Thank you for the reviews, they were very interesting and thorough. One correction spotted:
"Our personal favourite is the MSI H61I-E35 (B3). Its size and the fact it has an HDMI port, means that it's well-suited to a low-power but capable system if you're prepared to live with your CPU's on-board graphics."

 

Had to stop at "represent the cheapest examples we we could find at time of writing"

£47.41, roughly $75.50 is the cheapest micro-atx you found? Newegg.com has around 40 listings below that price, nearly all of them with x16 slots, starting at $42.99 or £27. Now THAT's what I'd call super budget Even the near identical (except for including a dvi port) ASRock H61M-DGS is only $44.99 ex tax.

Or am I missing something and being daft lol.

 

Might have been nice if you'd tested with a video card more appropriate to a budget build - 550Ti or the like. I can see the laffs to be had cramming a GTX680 in there, but c'mon.

A nice, realistic sort of setup would have been nice - answering a sort of 'how cheaply can you build a (halfway-decent) PC?'

 

Yes. Welcome to rip-off Britain with taxes on tax

 

so true ... in France we have a lot of 45 - 50€ (Incl. 19.6% VAT) LGA1155 mobo : http://www.ldlc.com/fiche/PB00133317.html

 

Here the MSI seems to cost 66 € (+13 € postage) in the cheapest place (53 £ (or 64 £ with the mandatory shipping)) so stop whining your eyes out. Everyone knows stuff is cheap in the USA, get over it already.

 

Granted these boards are super cheap because of their lack of typical basic features. I was hoping to see an answer as to the type of components used on these boards. I usually build computers like this for friends, family, and Co-workers. My main concern with going too 'cheap' is the quality of components. Are these boards more likely to fail than say a Intel DZ77GA-70K that was tested?