I wouldn't, if your going to go AMD i would not get a 754Pin AMD64 motherboard. Just to fill you in, there are two different types of AMD64 motherboards: AMD64 Motherboard (754Pin) & AMD64 Motherboard (939Pin) 754Pin was the first 64Bit released by AMD, so it was a stepping stone in terms of 64Bit technology, it was actually released quite awhile back, however the price was very high and so people generally were sticking with the AthlonXP (mainly the Barton) due to its overclocking ability. Over the last few months AMD have released a new set of motherboards (the 2nd stepping stone if you like) called 939Pin, 939Pin is called 939 because the CPU on the AMD64(939) boards use nine hundred and thirty nine pins. The 939Pin performs between 5-10% faster than the 754Pin motherboards... I hear you shouting.. "Whats the point in spending the extra £50-£100 on getting a 5-10% performance increase!?" Well.. it's not only that but AMD has stopped the line of 754Pin processors (not from being manufactured) but in development form. This means the highest processor that you will be able to get for 754Pin motherboards is the AMD64 3400+, which i think you'll agree will be a waste of an upgrade if you cannot upgrade your cpu any further.. Plus 939 has new boards being released over the next month that support SLI and PCIe (PCIe = faster than AGP & SLI = 1.8x speed of 1 graphics card, meaning you can run 2xSameCard and it will perform 1.8x that of having 1 of them as it will utilize both of them at the same time (Dual GPU's). So spending the extra cash is worth while, however if you are going to cut back on something in your new system i would not cut back on the motherboard or CPU, get the best u can of these, use 256mb - 512mb memory if you must (512mb being average to use). There really is no point in buying anything below a 3200+ speed AMD64 cpu, if you do not want to upgrade soon, as the 2800+ and 3000+ 939 Winchester 64bit CPU's are equal in most things if not beaten by an overclocked AMD Barton Mobile chip (1.4V Vcore) (reaching 2.5-2.7Ghz air cooled) I personally would get: AMD64 3200+ Winchester (939) £140 MSI Neo2 Platinum with SLI and PCIe Nforce4 £120-£150
Although I agree with ProcalX about the socket choice, I am not sure whether the PCI-E/SLI option is the best way to go. If we were concerned with spending and extra 50-100, think of the cost of purchasing TWO PCI-E video cards to make the SLI option work. If I were to run SLI, I wouldn't bother to run it with lower end PCI-E cards. With most of the motherboards that support SLI, in dual mode...the PCI-E bus is split between the two cards, making it 8x each. I think that having one high end PCI-E card would perform extremely well, and not require you to have a 660 watt power supply. If you chose two Nvidia 6800's or ATI X800XT's you would definately need more power. So, for the record....listen to ProcalX about the socket, don't get 754. You will lose you upgradability. Go 939...but make sure that you confirm compatability for DDR memory with you motherboard, and your processor with your motherboard BIOS. These have been big problems for people lately.
SLI looks good, but it's still got a little work to be done on it. It's not in beta, but there's alot of questions that aren't answered yet. If you want some sort of awe factor, I can understand, but keep in mind it's a new technology, and you're going to run into problems. Not because nVidia wants to put out a bad product, but they if they waited till everything was perfect, they'd never have anything on the market. Unless you'll just die if you don't have SLI, I wouldn't jump on it yet.
Awsome! first person to explain the sockets. Well ok so im thinking of gettin a 3400+ 939 i seen but it only has 512k cache and the other ones that have 1mb are like 500$ more (US). Also is the nforce4 a 939 socket? i would think so. Got another question about ram.. If i wanted to go dual channel would i have to buy a new set of ram for that or can i just use my generic 1 stick of 1 gig 3200 and buy another to make it dual channel?
You would get the best performance from buying a matched pair of DDR memory. I recommend Corsair XMS, but have had good performance from Kingston HyperX, and OCZ.
and get ram that has speed matcing, or exceeding your CPU FSB speed. Geil makes good dual channel kits also
