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.
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.
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