Upgrading memory help

Upgrade the mobo. You will get newer features and faster DDR3. For the $300 it will cost for RAM, you can get a awesome mobo, 16GB DDR3 and still have money left!! DDR3 is cheap cheap right now (good ole supply and demand).

Got any recommendations on what motherboard I should buy? I'm trying to keep it under the $100 range.

I'll leave that to an AMD fan, I'm an Intel man myself and not too hot on AMD.

I can give this advice. Take inventory of ALL you peripherals. Then go to newegg, start sorting things by price, AMD and look at all the boards that have what you need or might want in the near future, like USB3.0 support, SLi/Xfire etc. I'm telling you very few boards will have everything you NEED and WANT simultaneously.

ie - I wanted an ASUS Z68 board when I bought my Gigabyte. I owned 3 prior ASUS and trusted them. But none of the ASUS had USB 3.0, PCI-e 3 AND PS2 keyboard port (I have an older Logitech wireless KB/mouse that I refuse to get rid of til it dies on it's own!!).

After all the comparing, printing pages of comparisons, marking off crap I didn't need (like tri-Crossfire), highlighting what I wanted and needed, it came down to the GA-Z68XP-UD3P and one other.

The other had eSATA, no firewire, mine has firewire, no eSATA or something trivial like that. I figured I'd need firewire before eSATA, so the winner finally came forth.

Granted, it took close to a week to wade through all my choices, but I'm just that AR if I'm going to spend money on an upgrade, I only want what I want  

Oohh. I'm not as picky as you,seeing how I don't care about crossfiring at all. I only play on 1 screen. The wedges/lines between monitors bugs me.

One thing that I am concerned about is whether or not the motherboard has the bios to unlock my 960t. My current one can, so I'm hoping new motherboards will have that same component or even better.

Sure, and maybe even better abilities to unlock since it's newer generation unlocking.

Definately get a Mobo with DDR3 RAM. DDR3 is very cheap now so even a new Mobo and RAM will cost you less than $300.

I'm planning to buy a new case anyways and most likely, it will be a atx/micro-atx compatible.

USB 3.0 is a plus if the motherboard has it.

And how would you know if it's SATA III compatible? I'm thinking about buying a SSD to hold my OS and stuff.

SATA 6Gb/s is SATA III, SATA 3Gb/s is SATA II. if you are going to get an SSD it would take advantage of the the SATA III bandwidth whereas a platter doesn't.

and i *think* that most motherboards with SATA III would have a bios that would unlock the cores like your looking for; but do not quote me on that, i haven't had an AMD rig in a long time.

edited for clarification.

Usage for the machine? (sorry if already stated, I skimmed.)

The issue you have is getting the 4GBDDR2 sticks. Honestly I'd just get 4x2GB and call it good. 8GBs is still plenty, not sure why you are going for 16GB. Just buy two of these for $100 and keep using your current build.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Unless you need the more CPU power with a new setup, it never makes sense to upgrade your board just to run newer ram.

I would prefer buying a newerboard since it would keep me more future proof . And I like to do alot of multitasking and editing like with photoshop and other media software so I would like to utilize as much ram as a i can.

Best answer selected by bloojays23.