I kind of want to build a new x86 computer, however, I’m not seeing the motherboard that I want. I kind of have a reputation for having some excessive, but relatively low cost boxes among my collection. The machine that this box runs on was built from a $50 motherboard that I bought on Ebay housing a 2600+ Athlon XP ($99) and 1536 MB of PC133 memory that I got from mwave.com for $150. So, it’s a pretty kickin’ machine for $300 worth of parts.

I’ve been thinking about getting some kind of Opteron system as a pure workstation-type machine. The only board that I can find that really interests me is the MSI Master3. It’s a swanky dual-Socket940 board with twelve DIMM slots. Unfortunately, it doesn’t AGP or a PCI-E x16 slot to run some kind of pimp video card. Word on the street is that Nvidia is going to make a killer chipset that supports dual PCI-E x16 slots for their new SLI cards. I’m looking for something similar to this MSI board with dual Socket940 support and lots o’ DIMMs with PCI-E or an AGP slot.