Okay all you mobo experts, I need some help. A friend of mine, currently living on a shoe string budget, wants to upgrade an old Gateway PIII computer. He's trying to do this on the cheap so he's thinking of a new mobo, new processor, and RAM. He'd like to keep his existing case, power supply, and drives. He's willing to live with integrated graphics. Although I haven't looked at his existing computer, I'm pretty sure the mobo is an ATX.

I have no idea which mobo/processor combo to recommend because I never build at this end of the capability scale. I'd like to recommend something that has a little growth capability--i.e., faster processor, add a plug in graphics card, possible growth to Vista (if it ever ships), more RAM, etc.

He'd like to keep the entire upgrade under $200 but is willing to go $250-300 if there is serious compelling reason to do so. BTW--he doesn't plan to use the computer for anything that requires extreme frame rates, mostly email, the web, etc.

That said, what combos do you recommend and why?

Many thanks for your help,

Woody

Fry's still sells cheap combos. They have a sempron with nforce3 board (heatsink extra) for $59. Most likely, your friend will need a new power supply anyway for any newer cpu, so I would look at some inexpensive cases. Directron, newegg, and cable mart all have some for around $35 shipped. Ddram will run you about $40 for a single 512 meg stick. And of course there's Dell. This week's special includes a celeron with 17 inch LCD for only $329 with free shipping and handling. Hard to beat the price of Dell, even though nobody here will recommend them.

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3000+

Motherboard: Asus A8N-VM

RAM: OCZ EL 512MB (2 x 256MB) DDR400