Dave Farquhar
Experienced Member
I'm shopping for a motherboard to build a low-midrange PC, and spotted the Biostar A780L3G. It has a floppy connector, and according to the manual, BIOS support for 360k, 720k, 1.2mb, and 1.44mb drives. I can't tell if it supports two floppies or not, but you could always install a 5.25" drive on the connector, and plug in a USB 3.5" drive if you needed it.
It also has parallel ATA, a header for a parallel port--which has me wondering where my stash of parallel port brackets is--and both DVI and VGA out. It's unusual to see DVI connectors on a $50 motherboard.
It's an AMD Socket AM3+ board, so it takes AMD Sempron, Athlon II and Phenom II CPUs. You can run a 64-bit OS on it if you want, or you can run XP on it if that's more your thing.
I'm looking at the possibility of getting one in a $90 bundle at Micro Center.
And at the very least, it appears Biostar's A770E3 full ATX board has a similar collection of legacy ports.
So it looks like if we want options for transferring data from current to previous-generation technology, at least we still have a couple of options this generation.
It also has parallel ATA, a header for a parallel port--which has me wondering where my stash of parallel port brackets is--and both DVI and VGA out. It's unusual to see DVI connectors on a $50 motherboard.
It's an AMD Socket AM3+ board, so it takes AMD Sempron, Athlon II and Phenom II CPUs. You can run a 64-bit OS on it if you want, or you can run XP on it if that's more your thing.
I'm looking at the possibility of getting one in a $90 bundle at Micro Center.
And at the very least, it appears Biostar's A770E3 full ATX board has a similar collection of legacy ports.
So it looks like if we want options for transferring data from current to previous-generation technology, at least we still have a couple of options this generation.
