Athlon64 and a free motherboard!?

I must not like money or something, because every time I get it I immediately start looking for ways to get rid of it. That being said, I was looking at Newegg's CPU section when I noticed a little link to a deal where you can buy an AMD Athlon64 3400 and you get a free motherboard with it. Now I'm looking at these mobos and I'm not sure if they're any good:

• BIOSTAR NF325-A7 Socket 754 NVIDIA nForce3 250 ATX
• PC CHIPS M861G V1.6 Socket 754 VIA K8M800 Micro ATX AMD
• Gigabyte GA-K8VM800M Socket 754 VIA K8M800 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard

The Biostar doesn't seem too bad and most of the comments for it are favorable. It really seems like a good upgrade board for me since, as far as I can tell, it supports the rest of my hardware.

I'm wary of the PC-Chips board. I bought one from a guy who built my first PC after I failed to do it myself, and although it worked I couldn't get my graphics card to work with the drivers installed. Of course I wasn't as technically proficient back then, but overall the board just seemed wonky. Also, I don't know very much about chipsets, but I recall reading bad things about VIA.

Can't say much about the last one either. Reviews still seem mostly positive, but I'm concerned about the one I read which says it didn't handle gaming very well. I've never used this brand either so I don't have any personal experience to go off of. Otherwise, it seems alright.

And of course I'm wondering about the processor itself. 2.4 Ghz is a nice upgrade for me since I've been stuck below the 2.0 mark. I don't see any mention of a Front-Side Bus so I guess Athlon64 has something else. Either way, it should be a good improvement over my notoverclockedbecausei'mtooparanoidtodoit Duron, and if I go with this deal I can upgrade just the CPU without changing anything else.

Any thoughts on this? I figured some people on here might be interested in knowing about this.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

It seems like most of my machine is living in the past. My graphics card is AGP and my hard drives are IDE (whatever's being phased out for SATA). While I'd like to overhaul the whole system, I don't believe I can afford to do that right now. I haven't yet started paying all of my own costs, but I'm out of College and trying to save up for when I inevitably will have to do that. Does that make this deal seem any more sensible?

Here's my current setup:
ASUS A7N8X-X motherboard (I realize replacing this with one of those is probably a step down)
AMD Duron 1.8 Ghz (says it can be overclocked to 3000 Mhz but I don't dare)
2 x 512MB Corsair 184-Pin DDR SDRAM 333 PC2700 (someone said I might need to upgrade to DDR from SDRAM, wtf is this then?)
2 x 80GB Maxtor something something (one installed)
200GB Maxtor something better (installed)
Nvidia GeForce 6800 AGPx8 (it's green)
PCI Soundblaster Audigy MP3+ (I keep thinking about replacing this)
Crappy wireless NIC that has trouble picking up Airport signals

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I'll post this here too. Here's my current setup:
ASUS A7N8X-X motherboard (I realize replacing this with one of those is probably a step down)
AMD Duron 1.8 Ghz (says it can be overclocked to 3000 Mhz but I don't dare)
2 x 512MB Corsair 184-Pin DDR SDRAM 333 PC2700 (someone said I might need to upgrade to DDR from SDRAM, wtf is this then?)
2 x 80GB Maxtor something something (one installed)
200GB Maxtor something better (installed)
Nvidia GeForce 6800 AGPx8 (it's green)
PCI Soundblaster Audigy MP3+ (I keep thinking about replacing this)
Crappy wireless NIC that has trouble picking up Airport signals

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Dayvon

Double Post:

What does socket A have anything to do with anything?

Er...unless I'm mistaken, it has to do with me since a Duron is a Socket A chip and that's what I currently have, so how exactly would I upgrade to the Athlon64 without changing the motherboard as well?

And also, I do happen to have thermal paste and a heatsink/fan, but I couldn't get it to work. Of course, I was attending College at the time so I was a little distracted.

Oh, and I don't pay cash for computer parts since I order them online.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Actually, I've got one of these, and assuming it actually works I wouldn't need to buy heatsink/fan. Of course, the reason it's not currently installed is because I couldn't get it to work in the first place so....

Most amazing jew boots

Originally Posted by Rakka

If you have the cheap thermal goop stuff that came with the heatsink too, then you should be set. If not, you can just buy some cheap stuff from your local computer store...it'd probably be cheaper than buying from Newegg after shipping charges.

I think I've still got some Arctic Silver from my last attempt at mounting this thing. Only problem is I couldn't get my PC to boot while it was installed, and I thought I'd killed my older (and faster) CPU.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?