i need advice on which motherboard to get for a amd athlon 64 3200+

socket 939

ive heard good things about the neo 2 platinum but thats kind of expensive

also, what is a good, quiet heatsink

for now, i'm considering zalman

Zalman is a very good choice for exceptional cooling with low noise. As for a mobo......Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe w/ DualDDR400, 7.1 Audio, Gigabit Lan, 2 x PCI-E x16 SLI

ouch

anything cheaper?

also, whats the difference between retail and oem motherboards?

do the oem not com with any cables/software?

exactly, and check to see if it comes with a manual, some oem dont

If it´s an ASUS motherboard and it´s OEM, then I think you have a REFURBISHED mobo. You don´t want that, it was a defect mobo before (90% got wrongly flashed but still).

ASUS A8V with AGP8x * for 140.00 US$

ASUS A8V-E with PCI-E* for 170.00 US$

ASUS A8N-SLI with PCI-E SLI* for 180.00 US$

* For now PCI-E isn’t giving ANY performance boost for resolutions under 1280*1024. From 1280*1024 and up you can see some performance gains but still the question is “is it worth it”. SLI is nice, when you have the cash .

Also, Zalman all the way for cooling .

i'd defenitely go with the zalman for cooling, those things just rock... and for the mobo, i'd go with an asus a8n-sli, you probably don't need the extras of the deluxe version.. i have one here and it works like a charm.. anyway go for an nforce4 one, i have had nothing but bad experiences with via chipsets.. imho their crappyness is the reason why intel dominates the p4 chipset market the way they do..

What's this PCI-E SLI used for?

@ holzer,

VIA isn’t bad, also iNTEL is still dominating the marked because they have a lot of patens on there name, together with better marketing makes it a giant to fight against. It’s NOT VIA that makes AMD bad and sure nVidia did a good job with the chipsets, I would go for a nVidia chipset too, but the VIA is a bit cheaper (looking at price/speed).

@ rjz,

Let me try to explain SLI in plain simple English; SLI is an interface between 2 graphic cards in this case that work together. There for you need a motherboard with dual SLI and for now it’s only supported by dual PCI-E (8x max) motherboards (there are some exceptions but forget them . )

Thanks for the reply. That was a good answer.