My 2 year old Gigabyte GA-M61P-S3 motherboard has given up her magic smoke and am looking for suggestions on a replacement. No real preference on manufacturer but would like to get away from the VIA northbridge. Am planning on utilizing all my current parts, i.e., AMD 9650 quad and DDR2 memory and also have a GeForce 8800GS video card. HDs and ODDs are good to go too. Am still running XP but am looking at win7. Pluses would be upgradability, i.e., AM3/AM2+ socket capability, DDR2 + DDR3 capability, esata port and HDMI socket are pluses too. Suggestions?
Deffinitely an attractive option. I have a MA790GP-UD4H in another machine. How do the chipsets compare (790GX vs. 785G)?
The 790GX is the original high-end standard chipset. The 785G is the slightly lower down model, but the newest version. As for the real architectural differences I'm not entirely certain, as I don't really spec AMD systems often.