I'm building a brand new system, and will order everything from newegg. I'm looking at an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ which is basically the same price for 939 or AM2. The price gap between DDR-400 and DDR2-800 doesn't seem like very much to me either. I'm not sure which motherboard to get though. I've had HORRIBLE luck in the past with capacitors, and I am sick and tired of resoldering new ones onto my old Epox boards. I've heard Abit is pretty good now with using only known-good-Japanese capacitors, and I've seen reports that the capacitor problem still shows up on some of the cheaper boards from some other companies.
I'm looking mainly at the Abit AN8 SLI (nForce4) and the Abit KN9 SLI (nForce 570 SLI), but I don't really care about SLI. I like that heatpipe Abit puts on there instead of a fan, but the fins at the end don't seem to be as big as some others such as the Asus M2N-E.
My biggest question is really if it is worth it in the slightest bit to get an nForce5 instead of a 4. There is about a $60-$80 difference in price it seems (between the board and RAM) to get Socket AM2 + nForce5 + DDR2 vs getting Socket 939 + nForce4 + DDR. That's not really a huge difference compared to the cost of CPU alone really.
My second question is if anybody has an real proof that Abit boards aren't going to have quality capacitors and if they aren't, which boards will?
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