Need advice for a mother board

[Guinfan]

It's been 4 years since I put a system together so I'm a little out of date on current technology. These are the components I'm looking at getting:

Pentium D 950 CPU
2 Corsair DDR 2 800 1GB RAM sticks (though could change depeding on MB)
2 seagate baracuda 200 GB SATA drives
Gigabyte Radeon X1900XT 512 MB graphics card
Reusing from my old PC:
Sony DVD Recorder drive and CD-ROM
I'd like to put in my old 200 GB IDE drive as well (if possible, not necessary)
Creative Labs X-Gamer sound card

Any suggestions for a mother board? I was looking at the Asus P5WD2, but I heard you need an older CPU to upgrade the BIOS to allow the dual cores, which I don't have. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks

PS. Any advice on a power supply would be great too, not sure if 400W is enough.

 

[Da_Banig]

I will recommend the Asus P5WD2 Premium over the original one, they have a refurbished one on newegg for $140 or the retail for $200. If you insist to get the original one, that's fine you don't need an old CPU to update the BIOS, my friend got the P5WD2 and it comes with the latest bios which supports the Pentium D line. I got my P5WD2 Premium with the latest BIOS (back then, they released a new BIOS)

 

[desilver]

Prescott=FAILURE
ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe=Prescott

I assume that this means something. Care to explain?

 

[mdd1963]

"not sure if 400W is enough."

Your doubts are well founded...many have issues with 1900XT cards and generic 500-550 watt PSUs...

I'd look for one of the 550-600 watt variants by Antec or OCZ, Thermaltake...

(ALso, if you can live with your current rig for 60 more days or so, there will be much performance to be had at the $300 cpu pricepoint when the 2.4G Conroe hits the scene...)