PCChips M861G v1.6a is a good option only if you aren’t going to use its on-board 3D video, i.e., won’t be playing games with it. It’s chipset, VIA K8M800, is a DirectX 7 part, an engine from three generations ago. In summary, you won’t be able to play current games on it, only very old ones.

But if you are buying or assembling a PC only for office usage, this motherboard provides a great cost/benefit ratio, since it is probably the cheapest socket 754 motherboard available on the market today.

And, of course, you can install later a real video card on it, through its AGP slot. The problem with this concept is that AGP slot is being phased out and we don’t know for how long we will still be able to find AGP video cards on the market. Of course this concern is only valid if you are going to upgrade your PC and install a real video card a couple of years from now.

Also on the good side it comes with two Serial ATA ports, so the only technology not supported by this motherboard is really PCI Express – which is not targeted to very low-end systems anyway.

So the only problem we see with this motherboard is users and/or sales rep thinking that it will run games. It won’t.