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Posted on 12 May 2008 at 10:57

One of the cheapest Socket AM2+ motherboards around is ASRock's AliveNF6P-VSTA. However, it only has two memory slots so you'd have to throw out your existing pair of DIMMs to upgrade. Instead, we've gone for ASRock's ALiveNF7G-HD720p at £33, which has similar features and costs almost as little, but sports four DIMM slots. Both ASRocks have on-board graphics, which is fine for non-gamers, and both also have a PCI Express 16x slot available for slotting in a dedicated card if required.

For our quiet system, we needed a board with 1,333MHz FSB support, so plumped for Gigabyte's GA-P35T-DQ6. This uses Intel's P35 chipset, and has passive heat pipes cooling its components. North bridge fans can often be rather whiny, as the size of the North bridge chip and the space available usually necessitate a small, fast-spinning fan. Gigabyte's system draws heat to centralised fins cooled by the CPU fan.

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Build a future-proof PC... for £200

Author: James Morris