motherboard question

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My old HP Pavilion a350n had a proprietary mobo, but it was made by ASUS and was just a slight HP-custom modification of a standard ASUS model. I found several mobo's that would easily fit into it, as it was a standard ATX mount board.

I don't know about other models and/or brands for certain, as they vary so much. But a lot of the bargain electronic store common brands just get their mobo's from common brand makers. Usually companies like HP just have the mobo manufacturer trim down some features of the board (usually to reduce power demand so they can use some wimpy 200-270 watt PSU).

My current ACER has a mobo that is clearly made by ECS (as, so I gather, are a lot of Gateway and eMachines mobo's), although I gather that ACER also uses Foxconn mobo's too. The only difference I can see between my ACER mobo and it's equivalent on ECS's web site, is the number of SATA connections.

While I agree with others that these are not identical to the OEM boards from ECS, Foxconn and so forth in their component configuration, they are standard, and standard mount ATX or micro-ATX boards.

I know from personal experience that it is absolutely possible to put a standard ATX mobo into many of these mass-marketed brand computers.

The issue is can you do so on your particular model of machine/case, and is it worth it. I'd first get some info off of your existing mobo (part, model or other numbers), get onto google and find it's OEM mobo equivalent. Then compare the mount points to yours to see if the case is going to be the issue or not. I'd wager that if it is a standard tower style case, then it will be possible (if it's some bizarro mini-case or such, then maybe not). My ACER case is a very standard tower case - not at all noticeably different from many cases on newegg.com and tigerdirect.com and such web sites (even the fron drive stack-rack is very similar to many others I've seen).

You need to do your homework up front. Don't forget to also get part numbers for all of your existing components, as you will likely need OEM drivers and such to make it all work with a new mobo.