It never ceases to amaze me how much fun the more budget oriented products can be. NVIDIA recently released their GF8200 based mainboards. So why not grab a Phenom processor, some memory and the ECS GF8200A mainboard and see where we end up? And I'll tell you in advance ... for this kind of money, this little mainboard again is amazing for the price.

See, this mainboard comes with Hybrid graphics, (integrated GeForce 8200), VGA output, HDMI output, HD audio integrated, Gigabit Ethernet, PCI-Express 2.0, Serial ATA (RAID 0,1,10) DDR2 memory up-to 1066 MHz and all that for a price hovering at roughly 70 bucks! That's just electrifying. Say you want to build a HTPC capable of decoding 1080P Blu-Ray. Well, purchase this mainboard, slap some memory on it and get a budget processor. Because the integrated graphics core will handle the HDMI and even media VC-1/h.264 decoding for you (Blu-ray / HD-DVD). This is just a very cheap alternative. It will also handle six 3Gb/s SATA drives, 12 USB ports and Gigabit Ethernet.

Let's check it out:

http://www.guru3d.com/article/ecs-gf8200a-black-edition-mainboard-review/

ECS GF8200A black edition mainboard review [Guru3D]