It's been well over 2 years since I bought a new computer, and in that time so much has changed... AGP to PCIE, SATA drives, 64 bit CPU's, dual core......

I've not been keeping up so I've felt a bit lost while trying to decide on upgrades on my old box. I was expecting CPU/Memory/Motherboard, but not drives/graphics card/power supply too!

Anyway, I've soldiered on, and I think I've come up with a shopping list that gets the best out of my £500-ish budget.

Motherboard: ASUS M2N-E.... link HERE
CPU: AMD AM2 Athlon 64 4600+ Windsor Core, Dual Core 2.4GHz, 512KB x 2 Cache
Cooling: Zalman CNPS9500-AM2 AMD Aero Flower.... link HERE
Memory: Corsair 1Gb (2x500Mb)
GPU: 256Mb Leadtek 7600GS Extreme, PCI-E (x16), Mem 900MHz, GPU 520MHz
Drive: 250 Gb HGST (IBM/Hitachi) 0A31636 Deskstar T7K250, SATA300, 7200 rpm, 8MB Cache, 8.5 ms
PSU: 400W NORTHQ PSU TITANIUM BLUE LED, CABLE SLEAVED 12-17DB.... link HERE

plus a couple of quiet case fans to replace the grass strimmer sound-alikes and some CPU thermal paste.

How does that sound to you? I've tried to get the best balance of power for price, and hopefully this will all play nice with Suse 10.1/10.2

If there's anything glaringly wrong/incompatible/missing from here, please let me know as I'd like to order this by the end of the week!

Why do you want to upgrade? What is wrong with what you have? You a gamer?

My current machine is becoming unreliable, memory needs replacing and there seems to be a problem with the ide controller. Every now and again I get a spate of dma timeouts on hda, which can be temporarily cured by pulling out & replacing the ide cable. I've tried a different cable and disk.

I've always replaced when processing power has doubled, anyway.

I do some gaming, quake mainly. I'm also looking to do things with povray, as well as image manipulation.

I think there won't be any problem with that graphics card as it is listed in NVIDIA compatibility chart for their propietary drivers in http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/L...ppendix-a.html

Hitachi brand for hard drives has been recommended here plenty of times if I don't remember bad, but it's also important to know if the motherboard SATA controller is well supported.

Some people say ASUS mobos are going very "windows-dependent". I can't tell you if that's true, but as the model you say is based on nvidia nforce570, there shouldn't bee too much problems.
In http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item=506&num=1 they make a review of ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe and install Fedore Core 5 for benchmarkings.

Hope it helps a little!

Salut

Cheers for that!

The stuff arrived yesterday and I spent the evening assembling and trying to do an install. It would get to the part where it had finished installing and does a reboot, then on reboot would lock up loading the NVidia drivers.

This morning I flashed the latest bios, tried installing again....... Success! No problems at all (excluding the usual Suse 10.1 quirks that we all know about). Everything is really snappy, apps are open and ready almost before I press the left mouse button on the app icon!

I don't think this motherboard is on the HCL, so after a few days of getting everything fine tuned, I'll add it.