VIA PC3500 Motherboard

MoSiAc

A variation of this board is being used in the 200 dollar linux machine that wal-mart sells.

This one link here has a PCI Express slot 2 DDR slots, and seems really good on power consumption.

Now all I have read thus far is that it would be great for the standard user, but if you put in a decent PCI E vid card and beefed the ram up and used a SATA port for the hard drive couldn't you run fairly decent games on this thing? I'm not expecting Crysis but what about say TF2 or maybe WoW or FFXI?

If anyone has run across any info on this board other then the information I linked from VIA please let me know I have been searching for a while and getting nothing really.

yoshamano

The board itself is pretty "meat and potatoes" so you're good there. My initial worry was the VIA C7 CPU. I know previous C7's (and especially their Eden line of CPUs) lacked the higher instruction sets (like SSE2 and 3) and a floating point unit. According to This though it looks like the C7-D in that mobo has all of that.

I'd say it's worth a shot. The CPU might still gimp you in some other fashion (such as the really small cache), but in theory it sounds like a good idea.