I am hunting for good motherboard for my dream PC. In this process I came to know about a lot of recent happenings in hardware side. Based on my requirement I have drafted this motherboard selection guide, which may help you also.

My requirement:
A powerful PC with latest features at budget around Rs. 50K. The usage of this PC will be mostly browsing, office suite, multimedia, image and simple video editing, email, education software, good racing games (not hardcore game PC) and linux distribution installation/testing. Future expansion of features also considered.

Base decisions:
Based on analysis and test reports from various internet sources (especially http://www.anandtech.com), I decided to go for AMD 64 bit Dual Core Processor for better performance. The socket AM2 was decided since it supports DDR2 RAM and virtualization in better way.

For motherboard chipset side, I decided to go for nVidia based chipset with on-board graphics. The reason for on-board graphics is the good review about performance of nVidia on-board graphics; and another reason is that I don’t require very huge graphical hard core gaming in my PC. In future PCI-E x16 (Enhanced PCI) slot can be plugged in with more powerful Graphics card, nowadays popularly called as GPU (Graphical Processor Unit). I have included motherboards without on-board graphics also in this guide for those who opt for that. I have not considered nVidia’s latest SLI chipsets, since I am not interested in dual VGA.

Other basic requirement such as 1GHz FSB (Fron Side Bus – connects CPU with NorthBridge Chip of Motherboard), SATA II standard with RAID, IDE, atleast 5.1 channel Audio, DVI-D output (better monitor support), TV-out, USB Ports, 1Gbit Lan (for internet – router/modem connection) and expandable PCI-E/PCI sockets are ensured in this guide.

Considering these requirements I found GeForce 6150 / nForce 430 combination from nVidia would be best fit. Here GeForce 6150 is the Northbridge chipset and nForce 430 is the Southbridge chipset.

I don’t know when I am going to assemble such PC, but this guide may be helpful for others in the mean time.

For more details:
http://www.nvidia.com http://www.amd.com http://www.asus.com http://www.msi.com.tw/index.htm

Here is the motherboard selection guide in JPEG format with prices from http://www.anandtech.com as on 28-Jun-2006.

Motherboard Selection Guide