Should I risk it?

[linguapura]

I have in my possession a 400 FSB socket A PC Chips motherboard. After purchasing it in a package deal with an AMD sempron 1800+ for practically nothing, ($80 for the pair). The board has no onboard chips at all. Trying to make a build of it proved to be really frustrating so I ended up getting an Asus instead (a good move). Since then it has been collecting dust in my closet since the Asus works perferctly. However, I am currently building a network, and I have a limited budget. I see one main advantage to the PC Chips board. It has lots of expandability. There are 9 PCI buses, and it can hold up to 3 gigs PC3200. As such, I am considering using it to build a network server.

So the question is whether or not it is wise to use a board of poor manufacturing as my server. I am kind of cautious about using it since my network will be highly dependent on the server, but at the same time 3 gigs of RAM sounds really good, and I have plenty of adapter cards to fill the PCI slots. Even more importantly the price is right. But cheap and easy may cause a lot of major headaches for me in the future since PC Chips really is a quite poor manufacturer, and an unreliable mobo opens you up to a whole network of potential problems.

Any opinions, suggestions, or advice?

[Cricket]

Originally Posted by linguapura The board has no onboard chips at all.

What do you mean it has no on-board chips? What model is it?

Cricket

[linguapura]

Originally Posted by Cricket What do you mean it has no on-board chips? What model is it? Cricket

By no onboard chips I mean no integrated anything. The board is simply a collection of buses 8x AGP, PCI, IDE, a Socket A and 3 memory slots. It is a M848A K7. Oddly enough, none of the M848A's I see online seem to match mine. But there are different versions of the board, most of which seem to have integrated sound, graphics, and ethernet. Mine. however, does not, and it has extra PCI Slots to make up for it.

[ComputerNut]

Regardless of what is has on the board I wouldnt trust anything by PC chips. They are known for the worst quality, and I've seen some ugly death beds for a few of them at work. For something as long term as a server, id get something a bit better.

HTH

[CaptTuna]

If the board is working then go ahead with these 3 words of caution. Backup, backup, backup.