After 2 1/2 years, my old MSI 865PE Neo2 motherboard just kicked the bucket. I was going to replace it at the end of the year, but it looks like I won't be waiting that long anymore. I have a few questions for the all the hardware experts out there about what I should get (keep in mind that I am a nearly broke college student :) )With all of the more recent technology that is out, it doesnt make much sense to go buy another board with old tech that is being phased out in order to keep my P4 cpu and AGP 8x video card, so that means I will be replacing those as well. I was planning on trying out an AMD processor, because I have heard that they are better for gaming. And with MS's new 64 bit operating system being released early next year, I wanted to get a 64 bit processor to take advantage of it because they have come down in price quite a bit. I was looking at an AMD Athlon 64 3700 San Diego, but I have a few questions:1. It is only 2.2 GHz, but somehow is lots faster than Intel processors at the same speed. How would it compare with my old 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 Prescott?2. It uses socket 939, but I heard somewhere that this might be phased out sometime soon. Would I regret getting a socket 939 mobo for this cpu? I don't upgrade very often, so I want a mobo that I can keep for as long as possible, but will be able to upgrade the processor once or twice during it's lifespan.3. How does the 1 MB of L2 cache version compare with the 512 KB version?For my motherboard I was looking at the ASUS A8N-SLI Premium; I want to get a pretty high end motherboard to minimize the chance of it dying on me again, and of course I want a PCI Express board for obvious reasons. A couple questions about this one:1. Anyone have any problems with this board?2. Why the heck do all PCI Express mobos only have 2 or 3 standard PCI slots???And lastly, the video card I'm looking at: EVGA GeForce 7600GT 256MB.How does this work with Flight Simulator? Gamewise I mostly stick with FS, but every once in a while I'll try a FPS or RPG, and I've been dying to try out the Elder Scrolls 4, so I want something that will display these types of games well and maintain decent framerates. How big is the performance gain if I got a 78oo instead?Hope I can get at least a couple of these questions answered, I haven't been paying much attention to newer hardware so I'm rusty. Nothing like good ol' system failure to force you to relearn everything... :)Thanks,Scott

Hi,I can't answer all your questions, but just wanted you to know I have an Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego chip on an Asus A8N-E mobo (not SLI), with 1GB generic RAM and a Radeon X800 GTO 256Mb card.FS9 runs sweet on this setup, as do Doom 3, Far Cry, F.E.A.R. and anything else I throw at it. The "bang per buck" of the 3700+ can't be touched by anything else out there at the moment. The San Diego is supposedly a great chip for overclocking, so you could squeeze more that 2.2GHz out of that bad boy.I wouldn't worry too much about being "tied" to a Socket 939 board, I think AMD will produce fast chips for this for some time to come. There are already 4400+ X2 dual cores, and AMD are planning a 5000+ in S939 format.The reason why motherboards are coming with less & less PCI slots is because of the increase of on-board functions (Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1 channel sound, RAID, loads of USB 2.0 ports, S-ATA), so you will probably not need more that one or two plug in cards (TV tuner card, better sound card etc), but it's not like a few years ago when you needed a PCI card for sound, Ethernet, USB, RAID controller etc.

Thanks Jock, this clears up a lot of things. I considered going with an Athlon 64 3200 instead, but I think with a $50 difference the 3700 is a better deal so I'll stick with it. I'm going to go with the ASUS A8N SLI standard instead of premium though, I'll save $50 there and I really don't need that extra stuff. Thanks again!-Scott