a socket 939 board with nForce3 chipset would be pretty good I think - and the socket 939 Athlon 64 chips are nice performers... you could easily get one of quite a few boards along with at least an Athlon 64 3000+ for below the $500 line.

I picked up an Epox 9NDA3+ for $150 and my Athlon 64 3000+ for $199, and that was back a year ago december.

Best thing to do is to go to your motherboard's website and look up information on what the highest Socket A processor you can throw in there. You have to do that because some motherboards don't support anything over a certain speed, like 2000+. The highest Socket A is a 3200 for like $140 or a 3000 for $100.

If you decide to just get a new mobo and cpu grab this mobo:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...N82E16813157081
it has an agp slot and a pci 16x slot incase you want to upgrade later

It supports any 64 processor from 3000+ up to the FX line and X2 line.
Get a cheap processor now like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...N82E16819103537

and you only spend like $180. Then when you want to upgrade your processor you can go up to like a 4800 X2 in about a year and it will be mad cheap since the new processors will run the market. I think this is a much wiser investment than just buying a high Socket A for $100 when you can buy this for $180 and not worry about replacing your mobo on the next cpu upgrade.

I personally just bought a 3800 X2 for $300 and I couldn't be any happier, that extra core makes a difference during normal computing.

Be sure to get the ones that supports PCI Express and SLI, Cause you can buy two of the same geforce cards that has SLI support and be able to run games using both graphics card, That way your games will look and run twice as better. Of course thats a lot of money though.

___________________

MarkusSchulz.com Party107.com 160k 32k

The thing with SLI is that you have to get two high end cards for it to make sense. If you get two mid-range cards it would have been better just to get one high end card. Because I will never buy a high end card at $500 bucks there is no way I would buy 2 of them, so to me SLI is useless.

The only way I could see myself using SLI is I buy one card and then a year later that card has gone done a ton and I didn't want to buy a brand new card I would just buy the same card in my machine and run SLI. The problem with that it isn't like I get 100% more performance in games with an extra card, at most(current games) is like 40%.

Thanks a lot for the replies guys.

That PCI-E with SLI, well had you bothered to read my initial post, I just upgraded to a new AGP card, and thus no PIC upgrade for about two years until I build a totally new PC.

That AGP/PCI-E mobo is a great idea, but reading the reviews, seems kind of sketchy. I've always run ASUS mobos, with a few exceptions, and those exceptions were never as stable, so I think I want to stick to ASUS boards.

Socket A?? That chipset is obsolete dude! Get a Asus A8V-Deluxe mobo and any AMD 64 and your good to go

___________________
Breaks, house, electro & downtempo.

get an amd socket 939 cpu
i'm using my cpu with asus a8n board, and it works great (nforce4 chipet)