Asus A7N Core question

[kjvonly]

Hi,

I've selected the Asus A78x-vm/400 mother board because I desire onboard video, and it has the NVIDIA nForce2 IGP chipset, and is only $78.50 at newEgg.com (I'm going for price, not necessarily performance, and I don't need much video performance. THE VIA chipset on my present motherboard just burned up, so I don't want another VIA.

My question has to do with 'core' compatibility in the CPU. The CPU spec's say 'Thoroughbred/Barton Core support; however, the CPU I wanted to get, AMD Sempron 2400 + 1.667Ghz, Socket A has a 'Thorton' core....

Is the CPU and motherboard compatible?

Does the above seem like a good way to go?

Do you all have other recommendations?

Thank you.... I'm a bit of a newbie.

Toby

 

[joelslaw]

the 1003 version of the bios adds sempron support (or so says the asus website) so yeah, if you flashed the bios or if it by some chance came with the 1003 bios (don't count on it) it would support a sempron.

If price is your biggest concern there are cheaper choices (as in the $40 range) . Go to newegg's mobo page and in the search criteria put "socket A" and "on board video" as the only 2 things you want. But most of the cheap choices are either VIA or SiS. You'd have to check each of these individualy as to whether or not they support semprons, but thats easy enough. You can usually just go to the board makers website and look at the description of each bios version, and see if it says something like "adds suppot for sempron cpu" or something like that. Hope this helps