I recently decided to upgrade my 800 MHz Pentium III machine, which was being used as a gentoo server at the time. I am and probably always will be a huge fan of Abit and Asus motherboards. Simply because of its solid features, scalability, and overall performance. However, at the time I didn’t feel like spending $200+ to upgrade this old server that hardly runs anything anymore except as an archive for older files that I no longer use. So I chose to go a different way. I wandered through a computer store and found a Biostar P4M800-M7A motherboard combo.

Now that I am in the computer industry for about 15 years, biostar unfortunately in the first years had too many problems for me and I left them completely. However, I finally decided to give it a try. The motherboard comes with an Intel Celeron D processor, which is pre-mounted on the motherboard. I walked over 3 feet picked up a nice CPU cooler. He then walked 5 more feet and picked up a 512 MB DDR RAM. And a new ATX power supply. The motherboard was $80, the RAM was $45, the CPU cooler was $25, and the new power supply was $40. All told, I spent just under $200 on a practically new machine.

Very skeptical, I am now heading home to install this new hardware. Very easy installation as with most. Installed the CPU cooler with the supplied heat transfer gel. Mounted the motherboard to the case and installed the power supply. Then I installed the RAM and all the cables. Now it was about to end. I powered up the machine, went through basic CMOS setup and set everything up as it should be. At that time it was using all resources based on the motherboard. The sound is a 16-bit full duplex AC’97 Rev 2.3 compliant six channel audio system. I set it up and also ran the cat 5 cable to the motherboard. Now from past experience I normally never use motherboard based networking due to so many issues and problems that come with doing so. It was a test though, so I thought it might be worth seeing how things work out.

I went to my online store, ordered a new copy of Windows XP Professional, and used my current copy of Windows XP Pro to install it on the new hardware. Everything went smooth and easy. Now my type of test is not exactly the same as most people using utilities to test machines. I prefer to use a real environment test. For this I decided to use the Dark Age of Camelot – Darkness Rising expansion. Why would he do this, you might ask? Well, if you log into 2 accounts in Camelot with alt tabs, it creates a small memory leak. The best motherboards I’ve tested run around 8 hours with alternate tabs on 1 gig of RAM without crashing or lagging much etc. While machines with 512 MB take 2-3 hours to fail. I installed Camelot and noticed that the integrated display card was not enough, which I should have expected anyway. So I installed a Radeon 9600 card in the machine for the 256 MB DDR test version. It should be more than enough to run this. Considering this machine is still just a Celeron with 512MB of RAM. My Pentium 4 3.4 Gig HT machine sometimes has trouble playing 2 Alt Tabbed accounts.

The drivers installed and I logged into the first account, once in the game, everything looked great, everything went smooth, no issues at all. I then ran the second copy of camelot and logged in. Things got a bit choppy, but nothing I wasn’t expecting. I left the machine on and started the timer. Here is some information for you about the background network of MMORPG games. These games are quite network intensive and unless your network card is working well, you will often be offline. It doesn’t matter if you have a fiber connection or a DSL line. I started doing the laundry and meanwhile, the characters were running through densely populated areas. To check for memory leaks and prevent accounts from being automatically logged out for being left unattended. After about 4 hours of testing the machine was still running, surprised by this I started running more characters and testing frame rates etc. I did notice a bit of lag in graphics and video, this wasn’t all bad though as I’ve seen much worse in much shorter times on higher tier machines. 2 hours and 19 minutes later, the machine crashed while passing through 2 zones at the same time.

This has now completely exceeded my expectations from my new machine which I paid less than 200 bucks for. Before installing the video card, that is.

The bottom line of this article is: If you can’t afford to spend a lot of money to get the biggest and best, then Biostar Combo motherboards may be what you need. So far I have 2 of these motherboards combined, I was so impressed that 1 was not enough!

The model and information of the motherboard are as follows:

Biostar P4M800-M7 A

VIA P4M800/VT8237R+ Socket 775

Micro-ATX

FSB 800

DDR400

Video

6 channel audio

8 USB2.0

lan

3 PCI

ATA 133

2DDR (2 gigabytes max)

2 SATA/RAID

AGP 8X

If I had to give this motherboard a score, I would give it a 9 out of 10 for price versus performance.

So far I haven’t been able to find more of these motherboards, however, you can find some of Biostar’s similar combo motherboards in my webshop under the Biostar Motherboard section. [http://www.nitecon.com/cgi-bin/store/products.cgi?SearchIndex=Electronics&Operation=ItemSearch&Manufacturer=Biostar]