EVGA 113-YW-E115-TR LGA 775 NVIDIA GeForce 9300 HDMI ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail

Comment:
Hunt up a price match and you will find this board good for a budget full ATX platform. But its more than just a budget board platform since it will make a decent gaming board or a media station board with its own built in hdmi graphics solution.It set up easily with Windows 7 and my 2x1024 Crucial SMS ddr2 667 sticks run without a hitch. My sata optical drive set up initially running IDE mode, no problems there either.You may have to fiddle with the bios a bit to get all your cpu cores recognized - basically just set for "optimal defaults". Once you have enabled "optimal defaults" this will cause the C1E setting to default back to auto which had the result of reducing the cpu speed to power saving values, so you have to go back in and set the C1E option to disabled.My E2160 temps are 34d and the chipset was intitially 47d (if you believe what the Everest utility senses). The chipset cooler was a bit wobbly (as others have testified), so i broke off the two platic pegs and used tiny bolts to secure it tighter. This only dropped the temp a few degrees, so the stock solution wasn't so bad afterall.I wanted a capable integrated graphics chip and apparently this has it. The performance of the 9300 IGP is a nice step up from the usual integrated chips and so i don't need to add a graphics card to this platform.WINDOWS PERFORMANCE INDEXProcessor (E2160)4.7Ram (2x1024 ddr2-667)4.7Graphics (9300 IGP)4.5HD (200G Samsung)5.3Of course its to early to tell, but so far i'm happy and would buy this board again - but not at its present list price. Good price matches are available for this board, and considering its 9300 IGP, it is a great buy at $129.00.

Comment:
So far I've been really happy with this board. I've been able to use the onboard video for everything including some very light gaming until I choose a proper video card.The feature set is awesome, with hdmi, optical and coax digital audio out.It has been very hard to find driver or bios updates. The EVGA site doesn't even seem to recognize the board yet. The bios included actually says it's an engineering sample, not for production use. The board has been very stable so far, but my E5200 has only been able to get up to 2.8ghz at 1.25V. Others seem to get much better overclocks at lower voltages, but that wasn't my top priority with this board.