I recently decided to upgrade my Pentium III 800 MHz machine, which at the time was being used as a gentoo server. I am and most likely will always be a very big fan of Abit and Asus motherboards. Simply because their robust features, scalability and just all out performance. However at the time I did not feel like spending more than $200 to upgrade this old server that hardly runs anything anymore except as an archive for older files which I don't use anymore either. So I opted out to go a different path. I strolled about a computer store and came about a Biostar P4M800-M7A Motherboard combo.
Now being in the computer industry for about 15 years, biostar unfortunately in the early years had quite a few too many problems for me and I completely left them out. However I finally decided to give it a shot. The motherboard comes bundled with an Intel Celeron D Processor, which is pre-mounted on the motherboard. I walked over 3 feet picked up a good cpu cooler. Then walked 5 more feet and picked up a stick of 512MB DDR ram. And a new ATX Power supply. Motherboard was $80, Ram was $45 CPU Cooler $25, and the new power supply $40. All out I spent just a little less than $200 for a practically new machine.

Very skeptical I now head home to install this new hardware. Very easy installation as with most. Installed the CPU cooler with the heat transfer gel it was supplied. Mounted the motherboard in the case and installed the power supply. Then installed the RAM and all the cables. I was now just about done. I started the machine up went through the basic CMOS setup and configured everything as it should be. At this time I was using all motherboard based resources. Sound is a 16 bit full duplex AC'97 Rev 2.3 compatible six- channel audio system. I set that up and also ran the cat 5 cable to the motherboard. Now with past experience I normally never use motherboard based networking due to so many issues and problems that come about when doing so. However it was a test run so I figured it would be worth it to see how things run.

Went to my online store ordered a new copy of Windows XP Professional, and used my current stock copy of Windows XP Pro to install it on the new hardware. Everything went smooth and easy. Now my type of testing is not quite the same as that of most by using utilities to test the machines. I rather use a real environment test. For this I decided to use Dark Age of Camelot - Darkness Rising expansion. Why would I do this you might ask? Well if you log 2 accounts into Camelot by alt tabbing it creates a small memory leak. The better motherboards that I have tested run about 8 hours alt tabbed on 1 gig of ram without crashing or major lag etc. Where as machines with 512MB take about 2 to 3 hours to fail. Installed Camelot and noticed that the onboard screen card was not at all sufficient, which by any means I should have expected. So I installed a Radeon 9600 Card into the machine for the test 256 MB DDR version. It should be more than sufficient to run this. Keeping in mind that this machine is still only a Celeron with 512MB ram. My Pentium 4 3.4 Gig HT rig sometimes has problems playing 2 accounts Alt Tabbed.

Drivers installed and I log in to the first account, once in game everything looked great, it was smooth no problems what so ever. I then ran the second copy of camelot and logged in. Things became a bit choppy but nothing that I didn't expect. I left the machine on and started the timer. Here is some information for you on the background networking of MMORPG games. These games are pretty network intensive and unless your network card runs well you will go linkdead often. Wether you have a fiber connection or a DSL line it does not matter. I started doing laundry and inbetween had the characters run around through heavily populated areas. To check on the memory leak as well as to prevent from the accounts logging out automatically due to leaving them unattended. After about 4 hours of testing the machine was still up and running, suprized by this I started running the characters around more and testing frame rates etc. I could notice a bit of graphics and video lag, this was not at all bad however since I have seen much worse in much shorter times on higher level machines. 2 Hours 19 minutes later the machine crashed while going through 2 zones at the same time.

This now has completely surpassed my expectations of my new machine which I paid less than 200 dollars for. Before the video card install that is.

Bottom line for this article is : If you can't afford to spend the big bucks to get the biggest and the best, then the Biostar Combo Motherboards might be what you need. So far I now own 2 of these combo motherboards, I had been so impressed with it that 1 was not enough!