thinking of upgrading mobo.......need some advice.

[elucas]

hello everyone.
I'm am thinking of upgrading my mobo and need some advice. I am somewhat new to building computers so bear with me please. Our computer that we have now is one that i built. but its starting to get out dated. I think i will be looking for a mobo/cpu cobo. What i have access to right now to put on the mobo is:

An extrememusic audio card
An geforce 6600gt 256mb/128bit ddr2 video card
2gigs of 184 pin ps2100 ddr ram
650 watt power supply
dvdrom
cd r/rw drive
and two hdd

Price is somewhat an issue. Im thinking somewhere in the neiborhood of $200. Im hoping to be able to get a good stable mobo that i will be able to upgrade in the future. Any direction would be of great help.

 

[ms2005]

To pick a MB first decide what CPU you want. AMD 754 boards are cheap but CPU selection is limited, makes good budget boxes. 939 is more flexible and supports upgrading. If you need firewire make sure it is in the specs. ASUS A8N-E is a reasonable basic MB.

 

[elucas]

thankyou for your quick reply.
Im not real sure on the cpu. my wife loves to listen to music, and the kids love to play games. But right now the games that they are into are games like civ 4, warcraft3, empire earth2, and the younger one like to play runescape online. I am usually all over the place , alittle 3d editting, video editing, mixing audio, and of course playing games, watching movies and such. Ive seen alot of mentioning about dual core coming out but do i really need something like that at this moment??????

 

[o1die]

You'll be hard pressed to upgrade for $200. Your pc2100 may work for socket 754, but will slow your system down. $300 will get you a better upgrade. Pc3200 memory is cheap right now. Xtremegear has the best price on the socket 939 athlon 64 3000 ($145 shipped). Newegg has the asrock dual sata II board for around $70. And chiefvalue had a pack of 1 gig Corsair dual channel pc3200 for $71 recently. That totals about $286. The asrock board will work with either agp or pci-e video cards.