Little brothers christmas computer

i have been asked to build a computer for my little brother for Christmas.

i have never actually built a computer from scratch before, but i have been wanting to for a long time.

i asked around for a bit, because i didn't thing i could build a gaming pc with legitimate os for under 600$, i was proven wrong, but than i was told that it had to be under 500$ with monitor and other things like keyboard and mouse and printer or else my dad is getting him a pre built bottom of the line dell.

so i will end up giving him my monitor, which i will hopefully have a replacement for by Christmas.

he will be buying a mouse and keyboard before Christmas (for ps3 web browsing.

i never use my printer so its his.

all thats left is the tower.

now when i said gaming, i mean he wants to play oblivion and morrowind and mod them, not run crysis maxed. and he will most likely be playing at 1024 x 768.

here are the 2 canadates for him i have at this time



and



i was wondering if there was anyway to up the ram to 4gb and a 64 bit win 7. or even a quad core cpu.

this is his first computer and it will probably be his only one for a good 4-5 years. anyone have anything i could add or improve the builds in any way?

i really don't get how to build a computer using new egg. and doing it cheap is hard too, and now that i went back and looked for some of the things in the above pictures, they are not even on newegg anymore...

this is allot of work.

i have a question, how do i know 100% a mother board is compatible with the cpu?

i learned a while ago, just because it could fit in the socket doesnt mean the motherboard will recognize what the cpu is.

yea, im open to new or different builds.

if possible i would like it to not need a bios update to support the cpu, i don't even like doing that when the i know the cpu is supported much less when the cpu isn't supported and i need to update bios for it to even work