Upgrade quandry?

[Ketchup]

My computer has served me well for the past three years, and it is still plenty quick, but I find it lacking in the gaming department. I don't do a lot of gaming, but right now I currently play Need for Speed Carbon, Sid Meyer's Railroads, and Hitman Blood Money. Here is a brief overview of my system:

Athlon 64 Newcastle 3200 (2.2 GHz 512k)

DFI Lanparty NF3 250gb
1.25 GB DDR
Gainward Geforce 6800 vanilla
Thermalright XP90
Skyhawk 580-watt power supply

At first I contemplated getting a higher end AGP card, but soon realized I could get a PCI-Express card and board for the same money or less. Which then lead to the question:

Socket 754 or 939? (Remember I am going pretty cheap here)

The Abit NV8 has the NF4-4x chipset so I could drop in my cpu and ram and a nice PCI-Express video card, and I can find the board pretty cheap on eBay, but

there is a much wider selection of 939 boards available. I could get a 3200 Venice from Newegg for about $40, and it should overclock better than my Newcastle, which I can't get much above 2.5.

The only thing I am sure of is the card: an EVGA Geforce 7950GT listed here:
card

So what would you do?
1. just get the Abit 754 board and the card
2. get a 939 board, cpu, and the card
2a. and if so, what board?
3. One other thing: If I stay socket 754, I will probably also pick up a 754 3200 Venice for about $30. Which chip would be the best to get: The Socket 754 with 1 MB Cache, or the 939 Chip with 512 cache and the dual channel memory controller? I want something that will overclock well, as I am am not quite satisfied with the 2.5 I get out of my current chip.

Thank for reading, I would appreciate any input.

 

[Sinn707]

Hello,
In your case I would recommend switching to 939.
One of my older machines has Asus A8N-SLI motherboard paired with AMD 64 3200+ Venice which you mentioned.
I can't say enough good things about A8N-SLI, first thing I did was install a cheap-ish Arctic Freezer 7 Pro for the CPU above and did an oc from 2.0ghz stock to 2.6ghz. Since then I have not experienced a single lockup, unprovoked restart or anything of that sort. Board is ROCK stable, it's been running for a couple of years now, sometimes for weeks straight before I had to restart by myself. It still runs flawlessly.

If you look on ebay there are a lot of A8N-SLI boards for sale, and this guy right here sells this board paired with AMD Athlon 64 3600+ Newcastle (2.2ghz) for $75(!)

http://cgi.ebay.com/Asus-A8N-S...39QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Nice video card choice btw, very nice for the money.

Good luck

EDIT: This is the exact board I have, not Premium or anything.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ASUS-A8N-S...45QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

 

[Ketchup]

Thank you Sinn, I agree Socket 939 seems to be the way to go. Thanks for the links.