Using the guts of the infamous DELL C521

For the case, any standard atx case will work. I've used antec, rosewill (newegg.com) and enermax. All work fine. For the motherboard, your dell has the nvidia 6100 and 430 video. I use the 6150 which is newer and works with all am3 cpus up to 95 watts. If you have ram slower than 533 ddr2, you may want to switch to a ddr3 board and ram. If you don't want to reinstall all your software, it's worth a shot to use a 6100 or 6150 motherboard just for this reason. If you want more features, go with a 790 or 785 chipset board.

Hi,

The on board graphics shows up as GeForce 6150 LE in Device Manager.

The existing RAM I have is 2 x DDR2 1GB/64 @ 667 MHz.

I don't mind doing a clean install, I have a non OEM license of Win7.

I'm looking for the right balance between future proofing and still working with my existing components (i.e. Athlon 64 X2 5000+).

If a new super motherboard will take my current processor (and more advanced ones next year maybe), but won't take my current RAM then I can look at stretching the budget to by some RAM as well.

I'm not quite clued up yet on what the CPU footprint requirements are for my current processor or others I might wish to migrate to later. I'm still battleing through all the AMD CPU jargon.

I know almost nothing about chipsets yet and how this impacts on performance.

Which mother boards should I be looking at ?

...I see that the 'Sandra' tool tells me that my CPU is Socket AM2/ASB1.

What the restrictions around AM2 / AM3, DDR2 or DDR3 when choosing a mother board, if you want to use an existing AM2 part initially ?