A friend wants me to upgrade his PC so I've been looking at cheapish CPUs and the AMD64 3000+ Venice seems a good buy and it runs pretty cool according to reviews I've read. But I'm stuck on the motherboard, he's happy with the on-board video in his current set-up but I haven't managed to find any socket 939 motherboards with on-board video apart from a couple of nVidia and ATI Express examples.

The snag with these is that they don't supporting Win98/ME, - is this applicable to all AMD64 boards or just those chipsets ? I can't see him forking out £60 to upgrade to XP.

Suggestions for a suitable cheapish socket 939 board with on-board AGP video would be appreciated.

You may have more joy with a VIA Chipset board such as the Asus A8V-MX which has on board VGA, which you should be able to pick up for around £40. I have used this board on many of my 'budget' PC's with no problems at all.

Thanks, I've been steering clear of VIA boards after a bad experiencce a couple of years ago, but that board looks ideal. Passive cooling on the chipset too which is a bonus these days. :thumbsup:

It might be worth going with a £20 PCIe gfx card and a normal board if he's happy with onboard graphics. Means there's less to worry about if the mobo fails :) I have an ASrock 939ALI32-eSata2....£60 and has PCIe, unofficial SLI support, Firewire, USB etc etc, very cheap and reliable board.