Cheapest Upgrade after AMD T-Bird

[mnarciso]

Hey guys my GF's AMD Thunderbird 1.4 finally burned out and well we are going to upgrade. I'm hoping to do her upgrade in under 250 dollars and I know it can be done but maybe you guys have a better path. Also I prefer high quality parts from name brands etc.

I was hoping for a few things on the motherboard: Dual DDR | nforce2 | Sempron Support (50-70 dollars)

Looking for the lowest possible Sempron Processor. (50-70)

512 3200 DUAL 2x256 - Reliable RAM at a good price prefer Crucial or Corsair or another brand if you guys got one I'm not sure how Kingston is these days. (50-100)

So what do you guys got and list prices if you can. I'll be going to Fry's for my parts since buying components online its hard to return bad parts and this is a time critical upgrade as she needs it for school so thats why if I need to return parts its gotta be close by.

Any help would be greatly appreciated thanks!

 

[dnoyeb]

I like the Asus A7n8x, but if your going for low price, get an Abit nf2 board. Im not sure the semprons fit there though!? Im thinking of socket A which is what I have still and its fast as heck.

Abit NF7-M or
Asus A7N266-VM (which is what I buld for my peeps), if you can't find then I suppose A7N8X-VM.

 

[sparks]

Dual DDR is of no meaningful benefit unless you are going with a NFORCE2 IGP motherboard, otherwise you can probably save a few dollars by buying a single 512MB DIMM.

I have used a Biostar M7NCG 400 and it is a very stable and inexpensive motherboard.

 

[mnarciso]

Well 2x256 is just about as much as 1x512 now a days so I figured might as well go dual for the time being. I checked the NF7 and it says it supports a Sempron so I think that is the way I'll go. I was also reading that Dual DDR might not show significant increases in performance benchmark-wise but the responsiveness of the system feels smoother. I remember switching to dual on my machine and playing some games things use to skip around trying to load things into RAM, but when I switched to Dual that problem went away so the performance gain is definitely there.