Need an advice on selecting a mobo / CPU combo

Welp, I've finally started getting some decent money from my new job, and concequentially I've started thinking about upgrading my two year old rig... After all my Athlon 1Ghz with an MSI K7T 6330 mobo is already quite dated, and with all the new cool games coming out soon I really need to think how much longer it will last....

So I should have around $150-250 to spend on a new mobo / CPU combo at the beginning of next month, and I'm really open for suggestions... What kind of deal would be the most price / performance optimal for me? I wasn't really following the latest hardware news in the last year or so, so your advices would be highly appreciated.

MAYBE if you moved this topic to the hardware section, where it belongs, you might get a little more help :trout:

I recommand you to buy The Asus A7N8x MOBO. It has DualDDR DDR400, AGP8x, Dual LAN, Firewire, USB2.0, and other goodies such as Serial-ATA. I dont know how much it cost in your country ( Canada) But this Board has a blistering performance.

An ATHLONXP 2200+ Will be a good solution for todays and upcoming games with 266 MHZ FSB.

Those cost arround 200 $ .

You didnt mention your VGA ? cuz if you wanna play Doom3 DNF And Half-life2 you need a very powerfull VGA.

Good luck !!!!

I use the a7n8x motherboard, and it really is one of the best you can get. The 2100+ t-bred is known to give more juice for the money, but with a mobo like the a7n8x you should try getting the 2500+ barton instead, because it uses a new core, and is known to be quite OC friendly if you have decent cooling.

Dennis, are you looking to go AMD or Intel?
For $150-200 the Intel route wouldn't buy you as much as going the AMD route.

For the AMD motherboard I'd highly suggest the nForce2 chipset, that thing has some nice memory speeds (very fast!) not to mention if you ever blow out your seperate graphics card you got a backup integrated graphics card(equivalent to Geforce 4 MX graphics).

So I'd suggest the Epox 8RDA3+.
EPoX info page: click here
Pricegrabber page: click here

They are currently going for around $95 on pricegrabber. It comes with RAID, Firewire, USB2, the works.

For the processor, you can't go wrong with an AMD Athlon XP 2500+, currently going for around $105 on Pricegrabber retail/boxed.

Pricegrabber Link

Hope that helps.

Awesome, thanks all...

And IRS: I've got an old GeForce 2 mx 200 for now, but I'll upgrade to something newer only once I'll get a newer mobo that can take advantage of 4x/8x AGP... My current mobo can't do that, so it'd be a waste buying a new video card if my current mobo can't take full advantage of it

^^^^^^^^^^
Remember, the vga is the main hardware that will give you the best boost in gaming performance.