The ASRock 880G Extreme3 motherboard packs a lot of features for a board you can pick up for $110.  You will find two USB 3.0 ports, six SATA6 Gb/s ports and even an eSATA3 port on the back.  Onboard is AMD's HD4250 GPU which won't get you gaming in style but means you can choose whether to purchase a discreet GPU or if you are not going to push it, to remain with the embedded solution.  In the BIOS ACC can help you unlock any cores that might be disabled on your Athlon or Phenom and as for overclocking, Legit Reviews had no problems coaxing an extra gigahertz out of their Phenom 2 X3 720.

"The performance of the ASRock 880G Extreme3 was just as we expected. It performs very well and gives you a great

platform for your upgrade dollars. As a bonus, UCC was able to unlock the fourth core, which not all boards (like

the ECS board we tested against) are able to do. You will not be disappointed with the way this board handles at

all..."

Here are some more Motherboard articles from around the web:

  Motherboards

• ASRock 890FX Deluxe: Comprehensive Motherboard Review & Investigation of

  Thuban Performance Scaling @ AnandTech

• Gigabyte GA-880GMA-UD2H and

  870A-UD3 Motherboards Tested @ Madshrimps

• Sapphire IPC-AM3DD785G

  Socket AM3 DDR3 Mini ITX @ OCInside

• ECS A890GXM-A AMD 890GX Motherboard

  Review @ Legit Reviews

• MSI 870A Fuzion @ Tweaktown
• Biostar TA890FXE @ Overclockers.com
• BIOS Option Of The Week - Write

  CAS Latency (Twcl) @ TechARP

• ASUS P6X58D-E @ Tweaktown
• Asrock P55

  Extreme4 @ Techspot

• ECS P55H-AK Black

  Series review @ t-break

• Gigabyte H55M-USB3 @ Bjorn3D
• ECS Elitegroup P55H-AK

  mainboard @ Hardwareoverclock