I took this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131234&Tpk=m3a

better in case you would like to have one extra pci slot (at the cost of two pci-e 1x slots)..bit cheaper as well.

Good call on the RAM, G.Skill is cheap but delivers stability and reliability otherwise seen only on much more expensive brands.
The company came out of nowhere just 2 years ago on the European market, and already got themself an excellent reputation for their excellent value.

The AMD 770 Chipset, however, is a power-hungry one... comparable to older power-hungry NVidia chipsets.
It'll do the job, but at upto +20W power consumption compared to the most power-saving Chipsets.

Its only advantages are the support for the faster HyperTransport V3.0 and the extended Power-Saving modes for the Phenom X4. Both play no role when using current Dual Core X2's / BE-2xxx.

The Athlon X2 BE-2400 is basically a 45W Athlon64 X2 4400+ (2.3GHz, 512k L2/core).

The fastest AMD 65W TDP CPU is currently the Athlon64 X2 5200+ EE (2.7GHz, 512k L2/core). For max. performance at optimum power saving it would be my CPU of choice.

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1) I have an eye open for future upgrade paths, never hurts to keep options open.

2) The 5000+ is right at the price & performance point I'm looking for. If I was looking for larger power saving I could always downclock!

If ATI is an alternative, take the Gigabyte 2600XT -> cheaper, better performance, lower power consumption.
And it's cooled passively, too.

This thing is stupid fast, I have never seen Win2000 install so fast.

weird,win2000 drivers seem to be available (the asus board is xp only)..no big deal,xp is just a service pack fo 2k anyway,once you disable all the kiddy flashy colory stuffed animal stuff you wont know the difference.slightly higher memory consumption is hardly an issue if you have 2gigs of memory..

btw,no tests with the asus board yet,had to RMA it-the board produced annoying buzzing sounds when accessing any type of drive (usb,sata,pata etc),no good for my low noise pc..would go for the gigabyte board now if I could,but it seems like gigabyte is not rushing the deliveries for central europe.

screw.

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If you have the option, disable it in the BIOS as it can cause stability issues.

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thanks,no real need-its only a matter of time,and I have all the time in the world
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this sums it up nicely.the differences are very minor,almost insignificant,at least from my point of view..
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yep,as much as I hate to say it,xpsp2 is a very solid system,and pretty much everything that was bugging me on sp0/sp1 is gone (nasty network problems if you have unstable internet connection,lag when opening shared network folders and some other minor things)..only the infamous 60Hz refresh idiotism is too hard to root out,it seems.


edit: one more sp2 idiotism: it comes with integrated media player 9,and I have no idea why,but this integrated version is busted in some horrible way,and wont cooperate with ANY of the codec packs out there (rainbow colors,inverted picture etc).full install of media player 10 fixes all those issues..