$150 upgrade?

[novice]

I am considering upgrading my youngest son's system. I last rebuilt it about 4 years ago
BIOSTAR TForce6100-939 939 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego 2.2GHz Socket 939 Single-Core Processor ADA3700CFBOX
2 gb DDR 400 ram
Geforce 9600 GSO 384 mb
a couple of IDE hard drives, 1 160 gb SATA hard drive
IDE DVE Burner.
Windows XP

Am considering this:

Biostar MCP6P3 AM3 Nvidia GeForce 6150/nForce 430 Micro ATX
AMD Athlon II x2 250 Regor 3.0 GHz AM3 65W Dual Core Box processor
Crucial 2 GB (2x1 GB) DDR3 1333 Dual channel
would be about $132 shipped
Sort of hoping to plug and pray on the motherboard since it is a very similar Nvidia chipset
Also have a 250 gb SATA hard drive that I can reformat and do a clean install if necessary.
Appreciate any input.

 

[Blain]

Please tell us what this PC will be used for.
Knowing that, will help us give you intelligent advice as to how your $150 can best be spent.

Help us... Help you

 

[llee]

I've purchased 5 copies of both the X2 250 and the Crucial model you mentioned. They both work great and have had no problems with them. Crucial's RAM doesn't come with heatsinks, but that shouldn't be an issue in any MATX case.

Make sure you back up your data before transitioning.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I transitioned a slimline PC between a S939 Athlon64 with Foxconn 6100 (6150?) chipset, to a Biostar AM2+ board with a 6150 chipset and an AM2 BE-series CPU, and didn't have any problems. I did have to insert the CD that comes with the mobo and tell it to install drivers, they weren't all the same. Didn't have to re-install XP though, and no blue screens.

 

[Blain]

You can use Fix HDC on the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows to avoid a reinstall after a MB swap.

 

[novice]

Sorry, He uses it for light gaming mostly Star Craft 2 and Counterstrike Source, L4D2, etc. as well as schoolwork and surfing the web, facebook. etc. No heavy duty encoding or CAD or anything like that. I just noticed today that L4D2 was laggy in some spots, and would like to at least get him an AMD dual core CPU with supprt for AM3 and DDR3. It currently sits in an ancient Enlight case but has a new Coolermaster Elite 460W power supply. I toyed with the idea of getting an MSI board that could do SLI since I have an identical Asus Geforce 9600 GSO card in his brother's machine, but then, I would need a new power supply to run the two video cards and have to purchase another video card for his older brother's machine. I am trying to keep the total cost down, since I also may need to add a SATA DVD burner, too since the newer motherboards tend to come with only 1 IDE connector. Adding a SATA DVD burner to the current component list would still keep me around the $150 total.
Thanks for the replies, keep them coming.