Recommend a sub-$200 cpu and motherboard upgrade

[slackerinabox]

My dad's P4 recently died on him and I have to pick up a new motherboard and cpu for him - any suggestions? Here are the requirements:

- He's moving from a p4 2.0 - i'd like something as fast but not necessarily faster
- He's a light user/non gamer - stability is key. He does use photoshop to touch up pictures but that's about it.
- The pentium D 805 seems to be a great value. Is there any reason to go with an athlon 64 single core over a dual core pentium d?
-What's a stable motherboard to go with? Is the VIA pentium D chipset any good?
- We don't want to replace his AGP videocard as he has no need for anything better than his Geforce 6600
-He has DDR400 memory, don't want to upgrade unless I REALLY have to.
his total budget is $200 for the board and CPU.

Thanks!

 

[Ika]

Pentium D eats a lot of wattage when overclocked, and runs like a furnace. A64 single cores run cool and relatively quiet. However, the 805 might be better if your dad likes to multitask, work in business apps, or do multimeda stuff, as it's a dual-core solution.

 

[Tostada]

Being a light user, there's certainly no need for for dual-core. The 805 is a good deal, but the whole 800-line gets pretty hot and uses a lot of power, enough that I generally recommend people to try and step up to the 65nm 900-series if they're getting a Pentium D. Also, the 533 FSB on the 805 is significantly slower than anything else, and the 805 is the slowest of all dual-core CPUs by a pretty good margin if you're not going to overclock.

Here's the only office benchmarks I've seen of the 805:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/05/10/dual_41_ghz_cores/page36.html

If you're doing a lot of multithreaded stuff or multitasking, the 805 has to be the best bang for the buck of any CPU. Still, for regular office stuff, I'd also be looking at a Sempron 64, something like the 2800+ with the bigger cache. The Sempron 64 2800+ and the 805 are both going to be about 50% faster than the P4 2.0 in average performance.

I'd be looking at:
CPU: AMD Sempron 64 2800 Retail $69.99 (newegg)
mainboard: Soltek SL-K8AV2-R1L $50.66 (newegg)
$120.65 delivered

or

CPU: Intel Pentium D 805 Retail $113 (ZipZoomFly)
mainboard: Biostar I865GV-M7 $55.66 (newegg)
$168.66 delivered

Both would probably work out just fine, letting you reuse your old AGP card and DDR400.

 

[akshayt]

Amd 64bit 3200 Venice + Asus A8N E

 

[Tostada]

A Venice is such a total waste. Either spend more for dual core or save money and get a Sempron 64 which is just as fast.