All-in-one motherboards

i would go with 2 cause it seems to offer more expandability then what 4 offers and 2 is the same price as 4, i would go with 2

2 is a no brainer cause it has 2 DDR slots, offers both 2 IDE and 2 SATA connections, PCI Express 16x and PCI. $10 more then 1 is worth it for the extra expansion offered for 2, and the same amount for option 4 as for option 2 and yet option 4 lacks PCI Express. i say again i would opt for option 2.

or unless someone has a better choice

I've dealt with VIA processors (and motherboards) before, and while they can make a decent chipset, their processors consistantly perform 3 or 4 times worse than a Celeron of comparable clock speed. If speed is not a problem, go with #2, but keep in mind that it will be about as fast as a Slot 1 Pentium 3 for most tasks. I'd buy #4, because it is a Core 2 Duo core and it has decent expansion.

What are you going to use it for? That would be the main factor in recommending one board over the other.
It looks like small form-factor is a priority. Are you more interested in performance or power consumption?
If we're just talking geek cred, go with the VIA. You find Celerons in the computers grandparents buy.

I was looking for something reasonably small and fast enough and cheap to scan drives and do backups for customer's computers along with occasional gaming using older games. Option 1 could be purchased locally but I looked today and it wasn't there.

At the moment I'm using a P3-733 on an Intel motherboard to do this along with a USB2/Firewire 400 card. While it works, it could stand to run faster.

I stopped by a local computer store at lunch and to see what would be required in order to get a cheap system going. For a Celeron system would require the following:

Socket T motherboard for $60
Intel Celeron 420 processor for $45
1GB DDR2-800 memory for $35
Power supply and case for $35

Totals up to $175 not including tax, hard disks or optical disks.

Unfortunately the cheaper motherboards for socket T (775) and socket AM2 only have 1 IDE connector, at least around here so an IDE-SATA adapter would be required. With one of the 4 boards above I would only need a power supply and some memory, bringing the total to $130 or so since I could use an existing power supply.

I found a refurbished Socket A board for $20 plus memory at $25 for 512MB RAM.

Combined with the Sempron processor I have and other parts it should work very well for what I'm trying to do.

I'd go with option 5. Sounds like the best deal, plus if you use parts you've already got thats money saved.

I went for option 5. The motherboard was a Jetway V400DB (VIA KT400 chipset) and the memory was Hynix DDR400. Apparently the refurbished part on the motherboard was the capacitors. It's very similar to a set of MachSpeed motherboards we had at work a few years back. All of them ended up with leaky capacitors.

Along with:
- a DVD burner pulled from an external case
- a 60 GB refurbished hard drive purchased earlier
- a GeForce FX5200 256MB AGP video card that I have had for a while
- a new ATX case with power supply (none of my current power supplies could give it enough juice and the cases I had were made for older systems and didn't have good airflow)
- a Sempron 2300 processor
- a new el cheapo network card (did not have any at home - strange)

it's a pretty nice system. I've already reinstalled Windows since it's significantly different from what I was using before and would not load fully. I haven't reinstalled Ubuntu yet - I'm sure it would still work but the reinstall of Windows erased GRUB. I may try OpenSUSE this time.

It will also boot from a USB CD-ROM drive but only apparently at USB 1.1 speeds. Blech!