HP Pro 3015 MT Motherboard

This Pegatron M2N78-LA motherboard is very reminiscent of ASUS motherboards and I wonder if they had a hand in its manufacture. It has many features including a digital output for surround sound, which could be useful in a studio, or for simply playing games. This board has the NVIDIA MCP78OV chipset, which is one of the best.

It has modern PCI slots covering PCI 2.3, PCIe-x1, and PCIe-x16 types. It can have two internal 3.5-inch SATA hard disk drives, and there is space in the hard disk cage to add another disk, so you can keep a backup copy of your work in another drive as well. It also has the standard RJ-45 network interface socket to connect to the Internet, and a whole host of I/O sockets, which you can read about in the manual.

When buying second-hand motherboards and computers, the one thing to look at is the capacitors near the CPU. If you see any that have bulging tops or ones where the tops have corrosion, then you want to avoid it. On this board they are using a mixture of conventional electrolytic and high-end solid types which is impressive.

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