Motherboard Advice

Well, my old motherboard apparently sucks ass. I was led to believe that it supports PCI-E 16x, as it says so on the box and in the manual, but apparently it just has a 16x PCI-E slot that only runs at 4x speed, and one can only find this out be reading the nice small disclaimer on the manufacturer's site. So I am on the market for a new motherboard. My current system specs are:

Processor: Core 2 Duo E6300
Memory: 2 MB PC2-6400
Graphics Card: Geforce 8800GT 512MB

What can I get that supports this configuration? I have a very limited amount to spend (just blew $140 on the 8800GT before figuring out my motherboard wouldn't support it, so my finances are rather impaired at the moment), so please suggest something as cheap as possible, but I obviously don't want crap. Looking to spend under $80, under $70 if possible. I know I am posting among people happily flaunting their $1k systems, but surely there are some very thrifty people who can help me

maybe something like this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...2E16813131275R

i'm afraid anything lower than $70 is going to be outdated technology.

Heh, I am sure a great many people would consider the rest of my system to be outdated technology .

I find some motherboards that are pretty cheap, but I have no idea what kind of quality I am getting (as you can tell from my last purchase... lieing bastards!). For example, I found http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813186116, but I have never heard of foxconn before. Good deal or is it trash? What manufactures in general would you recommend?

foxxcon is alright for the most part. the main knock against that board is the older chipset. i'm not completely clear on how chipsets perform, but i'm pretty sure the newer ones are noticeably faster.

Hmm, how much is noticeably slower? Honestly I am not too concerned about speed, I'm upgrading half my system from even more outdated parts. I am more concerned about reliability, how good/configurable the BIOS is, how good it is for overclocks (only reason I can use this processor still is because it overclocks all the way from 1.8 GHz to 2.5 GHz). But if its a significant speed decrease between it and other comparable motherboards the inner geek inside me will beg me not to get it.

I searched around a bit more and found some other low price stuff, but its getting rather late so I'll be off to sleep for the rest of the night. Have a final tomorrow afternoon so its in my best interest to be well-rested, even if it is a rather easy course .

Cheap motherboards = bad overclockers. Their BIOS builds are typically terrible and to top it off, they use bad derivative parts so they can't handle voltage increases or the like. Foxconn is decent, but I would recommend eVGA, Intel, Gigabyte, ASUS, and Abit. Of course, there are exceptions even under those guys, so check average user reviews.

Alright, let me throw a few things at you guys and get your opinions:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128084
Looks to be the upper end of what I would get. Gigabyte brand P35 at $75. The reviews seem to be a bit divided on whether it overclocks well or not.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128078
Gigabyte also. Looks to meet all my needs and is pretty cheap at $60. Has probably the best review score of all I have seen so far, with most of the low scores being DOA's which I know newegg handles well. How bad are Micro-ATX sized motherboards though? I figure the main problem is huge sized graphics cards blocking off something, but it looks like at max I'll lose 1 sata drive connection which wouldn't bother me.

i like the first board.

I've been looking around and read a number of good reviews about it, so I'm probably gonna get it. Can I get a thumbs up/down from our resident communist overlord before I order it though?