Time to fix my Desktop...

[Drayco84]

Alright, for those that have been around long enough to hear my ranting, the motherboard of my desktop is teh fuxxored. It (Probably) had issues with using two RAM sticks at the same time. (Replacing RAM did NOT help...) and even if that wasn't the case, my (quite laughable) attempt to fix it by forcing a firmware upgrade most certainly mortally wounded it. (It won't boot! Hell, I can't even get into the BIOS! Yeah, THAT bad...) Sooo, my only real option is to replace the mobo. The system currently has...

Pentium D processor. (Unknown speed, but something like 3.0GHz. Wiki says it uses an LGA 775 socket so the mobo I'm eyeing -SHOULD- be backwards compatible. It's the low end of the Pentium chips of that era.)
4GB of DDR2 RAM. (I'm pretty sure of this.)
AGP nVIDIA card (I'm willing to write this off as a loss.It'd probably have to be upgraded by now to keep gaming anyway.)
SATA HDD (Unknown size, has Win XP installed, which CAN be "fixed".)
Secondary HDD (MUCH older, had it in last comp. I'm pretty sure it's a PATA.)
650W Zumax Power Supply
ECS Mobo that's was probably the source of many sudden reboots.

PCI Ethernet Adapter (Tried and true, lasted through three comps. Onboard NIC refused to work.)
Soundblaster PCI card (The onboard sound was pretty lacking too... Plus, I think I misdiagnosed...)

The Mobo I'm eyeing is this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131393
It won't fit my current graphics card, but I was expecting that. Graphics cards should be a LOT easier to pick out after this repair, but I need to get the comp working again.

EDIT: If you guys/gals have ANY input here, I'd like to hear about it...  (Especially about future graphics card purchases, although I'd prefer to stick with nVIDIA.) And I CAN'T go with too powerful of a motherboard because then I'll have to replace my RAM and processor in addition to mobo and video card. Which, I just don't really have the cash to burn on it right now. Besides, I'd rather use this for a while, and then build a completely new one down the road. (One designed for a 64-bit OS.)

[RobbieThe1st]

Well, I can't say too much about that setup, but as far as graphics cards go, I have to say that a GTX260 is an awesome Nvidia card.
I'd get an Evga branded one; they have a good warranty policy and good OC tools.
One thing I found with mine(we actually have three of these around my place) is that the fan is "over-powered" in that under normal load its only running at 50% or so.
Which means that you can do some significant OCing without any changes - However, the fan -does- get loud when you do that, so be warned.
And, in the case of these cards, OCing it is as simple as clicking a "detect speeds" button and waiting for 5 minutes for the software to test it and find optimum speeds.

Now, I'm not sure that you'd care about this, but it also has good Linux support.

Hope that helps!

-Rob

[Drayco84]

Well, I can't say too much about that setup, but as far as graphics cards go, I have to say that a GTX260 is an awesome Nvidia card.
I'd get an Evga branded one; they have a good warranty policy and good OC tools.
One thing I found with mine(we actually have three of these around my place) is that the fan is "over-powered" in that under normal load its only running at 50% or so.
Which means that you can do some significant OCing without any changes - However, the fan -does- get loud when you do that, so be warned.
And, in the case of these cards, OCing it is as simple as clicking a "detect speeds" button and waiting for 5 minutes for the software to test it and find optimum speeds.

I've already found out while in chat with Tezkat that yes, the board -should- work with the majority of what I've got.

Now, I'm not sure that you'd care about this, but it also has good Linux support.

I'm running PCLOS on my netbook right now, and probably will get another Linux OS for my desktop in case I screw over my windows partition YET AGAIN. (Most likely Unbuntu.)