Hiya guys. Well my PC is around 5-6 years old and I think it's time to replace the processor, my but motherboard is pretty damn old so I'm thinking to replace the mobo too. My budget is set at around £300/$600 and that's without things such as hard drives, DVD burners. What I'm looking for is a good up to date motherboard that supports DDR2 and has a slot for a decent processor (I currently have an A-Slot AMD 1700+ 1.5 GHz !) for gaming (Only game I play on PC really is World of Warcraft) and just running very smoothly (I don't use Vista and don't plan on doing so.) 4gb DDR2 RAM is probably more than enough for me and probably a 512mb GFX card. I have a good knowledge on PC systems, I've just never actually build one before. And obviously I would need a new case for it, but I'd like to decide on a good mobo before I think about that. Any good help greatly appreciated. EDIT : I'm looking at this - http://www.probsolvexpress.com/technical.asp?partno=GA-MA790GP-DS4H And this processor - http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?amd-x2m260 What are your opinions? I noticed it doesn't support IDE, meaning I will need some kind of IDE > Sata converter if my HDs and DVD burner is IDE?
These parts are cheaper and will give you much better performance. http://scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=860613 http://scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=866077 The motherboard supports 2 IDE drives. You will need to get converters for the rest. I would suggest 4GB of DDR2 800Mhz cas4 RAM, and a HD4850 for the graphics card or a 8800GT if you want something cheaper. Oh and I do recommend you use Vista 64bit as it really makes good use of that 4GB of RAM.
Thanks for your assistance. Is it possible to just use XP 64-bit? Does 64-bit have compatibility issues with some applications?
Yeah you can use 64bit OS. It wont have compatibility issues as 32bit apps will run fine. EDIT: I'm talking about Vista 64bit. I think XP64bit has issues and I would recommend against it.