seems good to me. how much money do you have to spend & what is the rest of your setup? Are you looking at overclocking? I would go for the E2180 and get a Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3L this is a very good overclocking pair and will not let you down.
the rest of my setup is
BFG GeForce 7900GS
and I have pqi turbo 1gbx2 pc2-5400
also corsair xms2-6400 512mbx2
I also had a 430 watt psu that just went out.
I'll be picking up a wd caviar hd 250gig
will it make a difference that the intel board you showed is 1600(OC)/1333MHz
whereas the amd is 2600MHz Hyper Transport (5200 MT/s)
The 780G chipset has a lot more features than the 770 - and asus has some brand new ones that will support hipowered 140watt cpu's (AMD). !!!!
But I have not seen their prices yet altho they should be close or within $20 or so. The hipowered 780G would give you a strong upgrade path (futureproof). Asus has a better warranty (I think 3yr) many are only 1yr.
Also I would suggest the athlon64 x2 5000+ BE (black edition) because it is unlocked and oclox. Just make sure u r safe with the hipower board.
The 770 is a strong basic board. No problem there if you wanna keep it simple.
Get a strong pow supply - the demands are increasing.
are you wanting to upgrade the rest of your setup such as graphics card .etc? The FSB & hypertransport is the means of the cpu comunicating with the rest of the components .eg south bridge. FSB & hypertransport operate differently but are accentualy the same in the end product. Intel is switching to hypertransport with a different name next time round. If you can reach for $175 cpu (Intel E8400) it would be much advised as it is very overclockable and future proof in terms of specs .etc. Amd seem to be sub par these days so you should go for intel or wait for amd to pick up the pace. (which they might never do).
If you cant afford the E8400 have a look at the E7200 which is also a nice chip for around $125, The E2180 is still a OK choice but is not very future proof like the E8400 all 3 chips overclock very good. I would also advise you also purchase and after market heatsink as Intel/AMD's stock heatsinks suck.
