I don't have much money to upgrade and I am gonna buy a Core 2 duo cpu.
To do that I am going to keep my existing 6800 agp and 1gb (2x512mb) kingston ddr 400, oh and my 500w psu.

So there are currently 2 choices here:
Asus P5PE-VM, a uATX m/b that costs around 50 euro with 865g intel chipset.
The second would be the ASrock 775 VSTA m/b with the via chipset 8800 pro or something, which has both agp and pcie (x4 lane) and also both ddr and ddr2 slots. same price as well.

I don't really care about dual agp and pcie. I can sell the m/b or smash it! and buy a better one in the future when I'll decide to get a pcie gfx. What I care about is stability. (also don't plan to o/c much if any). I have had bad experience with non-intel chipsets in the past. I had both sis and via chipset based m/b's and always had compatibility problems.

Anyone with some experience with one of the listed m/b's would make me happy to share his/hers thoughts.

that asrock will do nice

Asus is a good mobo company and it has a intel chipset.
had some bad experiences with via. doesnt mean all via chipsets are horrible, its just when you have been burned you never wanna get burned again.

Just make sure your RAM and Chipset is compatible with Core2Duo.

thats why I am asking. I have 2x512 kingston value ram ddr 400 (3-3-3-8), I think it's compatible with every m/b as far as I know. So it's 50-50?
Anyone else? Is the asrock - via stable enough? if yes, I'll go that way.

I wouldnt scrimp on the RAM.

You mean getting new ram? how so?

You need decent ram to OC, unless your gonna play with dividers, which would then be a pain, but its all your choice. I personally think the ram you have is fine, since your on a budget and DDR2 Ram is reaching anal-rapage prices, but better ram would help your system quite a bit.

And ASRock is a spinoff of Asus, and that particular board got some decent reviews, the best mobo for its price. All up to you.

well from factory 3-3-3-8 I have it @ 2.5-3-3-7. and oc @ 440 mhz. So It's good for value ram. I wanna get the core2duo and a m/b, then ebay the old m/b with the prescott@3.0 then wait for DDR2 prices to return to normal at least and then buy some. I see no point buying ddr2 ram right now that costs an arm and a leg for no other reason except that theres a buying frenzy.

I intend to replace the old ram with a 2x1gb ddr2 800 sticks but not right now. (I know that asrock supports only 667 and 533) but prob. my next move would be replace the m/b along with the gfx.

Anyway thanx for the advice for the m/b. I guess asrock will be my next choice.