I was thinking of a AMD Althon X2 3800+ 2.0 Ghz combined with a Asus motherboard. I'm not going to overclock - just don't have time of an extra hobby. But, any recommendations on bang-for-the-buck cpu/mobo upgrades? Well, just from my perspective as a gamer, I'm going to dispense this now, take it for what it's worth.
Abit outstrips ASUS these days in performance. I run 2 Abit AN8 Ultra boards. Home and work. You definately need to make sure your box supplies good voltage. You will definately need a good cooler, I find the Zalman 7700 copper to be the best air cooling you can get. I tried others, this is it until you go to water cooling.
You need a recent power supply just to supply these boards, not sure what it's called but it's an extra connector that goes on the boards. Frankly, if your case is more than 2 years old, consider getting an Antec Sonata II. It comes with a 450 watt supply that gets the job done.
Yup, I've been happy with Abit momboards in the past. They're a good name. I also have an Antec TruPower 380 in the box from when I got the "silent PC" bug. So that does have the new MicroATX (?) power supply connectors. I've got numerous cases here, so that's not an issue.
It does seem to be the case where folding likes a lot of memory. 1 gig seems to be enough. Right now, life's sucking on my current system with 756K of slow SDRAM.
I haven't done an upgrade on my personal system for a while. I'm running Win2K Server (a mistake for a desktop!) and will finally get to go XP Pro. Will keep the other box to fold and act as a backup machine so I can migrate apps over the course of the next year.