There was a day when I was up on all things CPU & motherboard, etc. But now I don't care as much excepting that I still want to put together my own decent performance PC. I'm looking to upgrade from an old Socket-754 Athlon, and aside from hard drives, don't really care about reusing components.
I would like to stay in the $100 MB, $100 processor range, and I'm still an AMD fan for price, but I'm out of the loop as to "good" motherboards, and nice price-performing processors.
On my last build, I used a nice whiz-bang Asus board that had all the bells and whistles. I'm thinking of doing the same via the:
M2N-SLI Deluxe AM2 nForce 570 motherboard. It seems to have pretty much everything you'd want on it, and has good reviews. Do people still like Asus on the whole?
CPU wise there seem to be Brisbane and Windsor cores now? I'd probably consider something like the X2 5600+ ... I don't care about overclocking, so is this a reasonable price/peformance spot?
I do notice that all CPUs seem to indicate how much power they draw now and power supplies seem to have gotten out of hand. I have a 450W supply, and was intending to get the same, but seeing some of these CPUs state 90 or 125W draws makes me wonder. Is that considered low end? How about when using SLI video cards (figure 8600GTs)?
Anything else I should keep in mind? I know DDR-2 is cheap, so no worries there.
I would like to stay in the $100 MB, $100 processor range, and I'm still an AMD fan for price, but I'm out of the loop as to "good" motherboards, and nice price-performing processors.
On my last build, I used a nice whiz-bang Asus board that had all the bells and whistles. I'm thinking of doing the same via the:
M2N-SLI Deluxe AM2 nForce 570 motherboard. It seems to have pretty much everything you'd want on it, and has good reviews. Do people still like Asus on the whole?
CPU wise there seem to be Brisbane and Windsor cores now? I'd probably consider something like the X2 5600+ ... I don't care about overclocking, so is this a reasonable price/peformance spot?
I do notice that all CPUs seem to indicate how much power they draw now and power supplies seem to have gotten out of hand. I have a 450W supply, and was intending to get the same, but seeing some of these CPUs state 90 or 125W draws makes me wonder. Is that considered low end? How about when using SLI video cards (figure 8600GTs)?
Anything else I should keep in mind? I know DDR-2 is cheap, so no worries there.
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