Oki doki, my expertise should come in handy here
Basically you want a motherboard with all the latest hardware rolled into one, FSB400, AGPx8, SATA, DDR400 etc. I see you are a Pentium man so you are probably best buying an Asus P4P800-S - i848P - it supports AGPx8, FSB400 (800), HT Technology, DDR400, SATA etc. It is an Asus board so you know you are getting reliable hardware and it is just about the cheapest board on the market.
The board that I would buy for an Intel Pentium CPU would be a
Asus P4P800SE - i865PE. This supports upto 4GB DDR400 memory, AGPx8, FSB800, SATA, RAID (Windows XP only).
Special features:
- Power Loss Restart
- Support S/PDIF out interface
- ASUS Post reporter
- ASUS MyLogo2
- ASUS Q-Fan technology
- ASUS EZ Flash
- Multi-language BIOS
- ASUS CrashFree BIOS 2
- ASUS Instant Music
- AI NET
- AI BIOS
- AI Audio
- AI Overclocking
It does not have onboard VGA, but who uses onboard graphics anyway?
It also has 3COM 3C940 Gigabit LAN 10/100/1000 BASE-T Ethernet and ADI AD 1985 SoundMAX 6-channel codec.
This board will cost £75 (~$130 USD) (~$180 CAD)
The cheapest board I could find (quickly) is the Abit IS7-V- i865PL Springdale for ~£55 (~$100 USD) (~$130 CAD) It supports most things, like FSB400, DDR400, AGPx8, SATA etc.