I have exhausted Google, looking for recommendations for a low end motherboard to build a Mach3 control PC. It needs to have enough power and RAM to run Mach3 on top of Windows 7.  I have always used Asus and Gigabyte motherboards in the past for other applications.  Low-end boards I have considered are:
- Gigabyte - GAM78LM-S2H
- Asus 0 M4A785-M

Any suggestions/recommendations?  Thanks in advance for your help.

Brock

Any mobo with 2ghz processor and 1gb ram will do fine for mach, for win7.
Xp requires less, I'd go the xp route.

i just got one of these from tiger direct.so far so good.

asus m2n68-am plus      price 54.99

bill

If you are using an external motion controller you don't need a lot of power. I am using a 1ghz with 512 ram with Win7 and it works great. It is an old Compac deskpro en SFF.

 I only use it to run the mill.

I have an E-machines 2+ ghz that I run the router on thru the Pport and it passed the driver test up to 100khz. XP

Was a freebie from a friend.

Nice to have friends.

Mike

I had problems with an Asus board that had an Nvidia video chipset and driver.  i switched to gigabyte with the intel video chipset and driver all seems to be good.

msi for both amd and intel platforms, easy setup and cheap (er). tiger direct

I'm currently building a CNC milling machine and wish to use Mach 3 this time. (previously used Turbo CNC) All the post for motherboards are dated November 2010. What would be the most recommended components?

If wanting to use the parallel port with Mach then you will need to find a motherboard that has one or get a PCI parallel port, in addition you will also need to use a 32bit operating system as Machs parallel port driver only works with 32bit operating systems.
 If using a 64bit operating system then you will need to use an external controller and if using one of these I would say almost any  motherboard will work fine.
Hood

I recently scored a Intel D945GCLF2 mini ATX motherboard with Dual-core Atom 330 chip (1.6GHz),on board parallel port and 2GB of ram. Plan to use to build dedicated machine for new 4 axis mill. Any thoughts are greatly accepted.

Why make life harder than it is? Used desktops are cheep today and Mach will run fine with an old desktop /2GB RAM. I bought recently a used Dell Optiplex760 for $120 including LCD monitor, keyboard and mouse and Mach is very happy. Dual processors will not make Mach happier but it may help your CAD program IF you make elaborate objects

I will stick with Intel processors and the only components you need are the parallel port, a DVD to install the OS and a USB to copy files. My desktop is a dedicated PC just for my cnc and is not connected to the Internet; the only software installed is Mach3 and I have disabled the sound, modem and network cards.