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VOT U TINK

about

this combo from this page?

AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ 3.2GHz Socket AM2 Processor
Model #: ADX6400CZWOF
3.2GHz
90 nm Windsor
2 x 1MB L2 Cache

Price: $179.00

with:

ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe ATX AM2 Motherboard
Model #: M2N-SLI Deluxe
1000MHz Hyper Transport (2000 MT/s)
NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI MCP
4×240pin DDR2 800, Max 8GB

Price: $124.99

And is ASUS’ antipathy for Linux really a problem in running Linux on such motherboards?

THANKS TONS FOR ALL YOUR KIND BOTHER.

Do either of you like handmade stoneware mugs?

If you get either the 6000+ or 6400+ Athlon, be sure to get a good power supply, a quality CPU cooler (heatsink/fan), and a higher speed (noisier ;) case fan, as those two chips dissipate up to 125 watts. My personal preference is to build stuff that is rock solid, so I pick lower power parts, and still include the top of the line coolers and power. This would be a "AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ 2.6GHz Socket AM2 65W Black Edition Processor", from the Newegg specials you're looking at. It's a 65 nm process, instead of a 90 nm process, which is a big part of why it is lower power. Then spend the $50 you saved on power and cooling. This will lead to a longer lifetime, and fewer causes for system instability. Just take a look back at how much time your current instability problems have cost you.

But I've had fun building (and troubleshooting) systems the other way as well.

I used to buy mostly AMD as well -- good bang for the buck and I enjoyed helping the underdog. This last year, all my builds have been Intel. The Intel Core 2 Duo is the clear winner these days for this class of rig. AMD's HyperTransport may still hold an edge in memory bandwidth on four core systems, but that's not what we talking about here ... neither bandwidth limited applications nor four cores.

I have had good luck with the Nvidia chip sets, as in the motherboard you're looking at.

Even though you're looking at 64 bit processors, I'd suggest running 32 bit, rather than 64 bit Windows or Linux. Unless you're running large memory applications needing over 4 GBytes of addressable main memory, the 64 bit versions of these operating environments provide no advantage and some minor disadvantages (some software incompatibilities and a slight performance hit from the larger memory footprint of the fat pointers.)