What motherboards, chipsets and controllers should I avoid buying? I am going to be biulding some systems in semi mass production. Are there any specific brands not to get. These will be custom systems.

IMO, stay away from..

-Anything refurbished or used that is hardware related (mobo, vid card, CPU, etc)

-Mobo - ECS and/or VIA chipsets (nothing but bad mojo experiences...esp.with ECS)

ASUS PNP800 (Board design is lacking compared to ABIT

I have become partiall to SIS chipsets as they seem to be the only ones that have 133 ATA IDE controller support and have been flawless so far.

-Powercolor video cards., ATI X600 series

-WD hard drives (their quality has taken a nose dive in recent years)

-Prescott 478 based CPU's

Edited November 5, 200520 yr by LiquidSage

personally, i ONLY use WD hard drives in systems that I build, and have had no problems with over 30 drives in the past few years

why dont you tell us what you want?

My company is going to biuld some entry level systems for around 400-500

We would like to get 10 of everything? Any good recomendations.

Consider some 3000 (socket 939) Semprons, real cheap about US$95 They're good enough for gaming. Though they have only just been released so they may be hard to find at the moment.

And motherboard:

ASUS A8V-VM ~US$75, comes with decent integrated graphics.

Other than that, just add 2 sticks of 256Mb RAM (yes you'll need at least 512Mb total, 256Mb won't cut it).

Add a case and a 120Gb SATA hard drive + DVD burnen and you're looking at ~US$450.