Taking it All Onboard

Having quite a bit of experience in the building of many systems for many different people I often ask people exactly how much they wish to spend on a system. The most common answer is as cheap as you can get it. This is the most frustrating answer you can get as you know you can build a cheap system but it likely to have its problems.

The cheapest option to go for when buying a motherboard is to go for one with onboard components. these boards can have components such as video, sound, LAN and modem built onto the board itself. Great you think but expensive. Wrong in both senses, not good and cheap. Why is it cheap? Well the answer lies in the fact that most large motherboard manufacturers don't pay attention to onboard components and so your at the lower end of the market already. 

If your still not sure why onboard components are not good then read on,

Quality

Overall the general quality of onboard components is not the best they tend to use the basics. As far as the video goes its likely to be very standard video with no 3D acceleration and will perform poorly. Without disrespect to the small motherboard companies they do not have the technology that the better companies do. There boards tend to fail slightly more and have more compatibility problems. Due to all the components they have on them they also don't have a very good design.

Upgradeability

If your component is built onto the board you cannot upgrade it without changing the motherboard as well. Although that statement is not 100% correct all the time, it always causes problems. Often if you have onboard graphics you will not get an graphics card slot with it, if this is the case upgrading your graphics is a pain.

Its not all bad though if you only need a cheap system then this could be perfect. I'll break down the 4 onboard components for their uses.

Video

Onboard Video has to be my pet hate for the onboard components. Too many bad experiences with it has cause me and some others here not to recommend this at all. Onboard video is good for work and work only, they also sometimes use shared memory, meaning they use system RAM in order to have some video memory. If you need any sort of decent 21st century machine stay away. Some bigger motherboard manufacturers have tried putting higher quality video cards onboard but I still feel a card is a far better way of going about it.

Sound

Unless your a music addict or play loads of music on your PC then there is nothing wrong with onboard sound. It can be of a high quality. I have seen creative SB128's on some boards which is enough for most people. onboard sound can be disabled and replaced with a new PCI sound card as well. So boards with onboard sound can simply just save a little bit of money and you can upgrade it later.

Modem

The modem will undoubtedly be a software modem which means it uses the CPU to do the modulating and demodulating (digital to analogue conversion and vice versa) if you have a strong CPU this may not be a problem although software modems are prone to cut off's under strain (online gaming etc). You can disable modems and replace them with better ones.

LAN

The onboard LAN feature can be quite useful if you have a few machines, you could run a cheap network with them all on the same brand of LAN card by using several of these motherboards. They seem reliable if not a little bit of a pain to set up sometimes. Again can be switched off and replaced by a PCI version if necessary.