Help with buying new motherboard

[sarnold]

I use to be big into building my own gaming rigs, but alas I am getting older and kids have taken all my play time and have not kept current on the last 2 years of hardware.

My question is this: I now have an ASUS A8R-MVP motherboard and would like to use the same memory, but buy a new cpu/motherboard combo. I have been a big fan of AMD and I just recently bought a MSI R5770 Hawk Radeon HD 5770 PCIe express 2.1 card. I am not currently going the crossfire mode but might in future. What is the best combo cpu/motherboard that will have no hardware issues with my video and cost around $200-$300? Please help steer me in the right direction with suggestions and reasons why.

 

[Maziar]

AM3/AM2+ Motherboards with DDR2 support are hard to find,don't you want to go with DDR3 RAMs ?

 

[mosox]

You can't use the same RAM because it's DDR, they don't make DDR boards anymore.

You can sell it and with $300 you can buy this:

AMD Athlon II X4 640 Propus 3.0GHz + GIGABYTE GA-870A-UD3
http://secure.newegg.com/Shopping/ShoppingCart.aspx?submit=ChangeItem
A-DATA 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211364

$299.97

 

[Maziar]

oops i thought the OP was using a DDR2 RAM,sorry about that.
mosox is right,you have to change your RAM too.

 

[DokkRokken]

Yeah, like the gentlemen above stated, your DDR Ram likely won't be able to find a home in today's boards. The Gigabyte 870/Athlon 640 combo in mosox's post will be a nice easy system, although it will not be the best solution for Crossfire in the future, as the second PCIe x16 slot runs at x4 causing a bottleneck for the additional card. DDR3 also is the way to go these days, as it's very speedy and isn't too pricey compared to DDR2.

I'd suggest forgoing the idea of Crossfire given your budgetary/time constraints, and go with reliability. If you do need more graphics horsepower, upgrading to a more powerful card is likely the better way to go. I use a CF setup myself, and you do sometimes need to invest a bit of time to make sure everything is tickety-boo.