Legit Reviews

my ASUS board has been killing me lately, and i need a replacement board to tide me over until this one gets fixed/replaced.

i have 2 *inexpensive* boards i'm looking at, and i hope to decide between them tonight or tomorrow.

it isn't really a "which is the better board" because the choice is obvious between them:

the $54.99 Gigabyte board: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813128079

the $59.99 AFTER $30 MIR Abit P35 board: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813127031

i'm tight on cash, as are most students, but i just can't keep cluttering my workspace up with PC parts! this laptop is a POS and i'm not going to suffer on this crappy lappy with $1200 worth of components sitting next to me laughing at me. the real question here is this - is the MIR really going to make my life heaven or hell? if i actually get the rebate within a few months it'd be a great feeling knowing i spent the extra $5 between these two boards. the P35 chipset is much nicer than the one on the Gigabyte board, albeit neither of them have firewire. (to those who have read about the double booting problem on the Abit, it is fixed in later BIOS revisions)

either board would be fine to work with, but the nicer chipset would actually let me enjoy some overclocking and the P35 chipset.

help a guy make up his mind here?

Can't go wrong with the IP35-E. See AnandTech on what the forum members say about the IP35-E. I read a couple of pages and I think there minor problems when this motherboard was used with other computer parts.

Sorry man, but guess you'll have to read at least a couple hundreds of posts.

after talking on AIM with a few people i decided that there is a SLIGHT chance that my video card might be an issue, if not THE issue, so i went with the Gigabyte board considering it has onboard graphics and its not so nice that i might not want to take it out of my rig later on :D

not to mention that spending that extra $30 would completely circumvent the point of buying a board in the first place: cheap replacement board.

thanks anyhow!

You can always get yourself another Core 2 and PSU, and some RAM, just to run F@H. But then you can always do that with the cheaper Gigabyte board...