Akisame

I agree, why waste money on older tech, when there's Athlon ii It will be a lot faster than an Athlon even on stock , and you could overclock it to ~3.6 to increase the performance difference even more . And if you get an AM2+/AM3 board you won't have to worry about getting a new mobo the next time you decide to upgrade your CPU

Ben the OCer

By SLI do you mean you want a motherboard with SLI support or that you want a second 9800GTX+. AMD SLI boards are hard to come by since Nvidia is getting out of the chipset business. If SLI is so important your only good option is an X58 LGA1366 mobo which most support both SLI and Crossfire. An i7 920, X58 mobo, and 6GB DDR3 would be almost doable with your upper limit. Another option is to forget SLI and get a Crossfire AMD board. You can easily get a Phenom II X4, 790FX motherboard, and 4GB DDR3 with your budget. Those are some of your options but its up to you.

__________________
Stable Validations:
CPU-Z: E8400 @ 4.2GHz 1.4v, PII 550 Unlocked @ 3.75GHz 1.475v, PII 710 @ 3.6GHz 1.475v, E2140 @ 3.2GHz 1.3v
GPU-Z: HD4850 @ 685/1010, HD3850 @ 810/909

(Forrest Gump referring to Apple Computers) "He got me invested in some kinda fruit company."

OtherMike

just to throw this out there, i had a 5200 and i loved it. although the newer stuff is a lot more impressive

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take the high road, there will be more room for me down here.

KEITHRH12

Chipset Bussnies, like GFX cards

Quantum Reality

Here's an Asrock board that has SLI. It's AM2+ though. But if you have DDR2 RAM kicking around or don't mind buying used RAM from here on OCN, it's a great way to get started with your SLI rig.

Here's the Asus equivalent. Asus is pretty solid. In point of fact I put together a system last year with an M4N72-E board and I was able to get SLI going pretty smoothly w/ a couple 9800GTX+ cards with an Athlon II X2 250. I had some SLI driver issues; I don't know if they've been fixed since then.

Huh, wow. MSI's 750a-based board is quite cheap.

I can never remember the difference between 750a and 780a but anyway, meh.

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Ben the OCer

Here are two great builds:

AMD
Phenom II X4 955BE
+ Gigabyte 790GX Crossfire Mobo Combo: $260.98 + shipping after MIR
OCZ 4GB DDR3-1600 Kit: $58.99 shipped after MIR
Total: $319.97 + shipping after $35 in MIRs

Intel
Core i5 750
+ Gigabyte P55 SLI/Crossfire Mobo
+OCZ 4GB DDR3-1600 Kit
Total: $386.97 shipped after a $20 MIR

I don't know if that's what your looking for but anything more than that would really be overkill. Unless multi GPU and true dual X16 2.0 means that much to you. I hope that helps.

No, chipsets as in motherboard chipsets. They still have some but they are very old and not near as good as AMD or Intel chipsets.

__________________
Stable Validations:
CPU-Z: E8400 @ 4.2GHz 1.4v, PII 550 Unlocked @ 3.75GHz 1.475v, PII 710 @ 3.6GHz 1.475v, E2140 @ 3.2GHz 1.3v
GPU-Z: HD4850 @ 685/1010, HD3850 @ 810/909

(Forrest Gump referring to Apple Computers) "He got me invested in some kinda fruit company."

LiNERROR

considering my opty performs ~6400+... i doubt you'd notice much of a difference...

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K̤̦̳̠̣̖̩̦̦̣͕̭̠̼̺̞h͚͔̭͖̳aos 4593.37 ~173% OC i7 920/12GB/1284EE CPU-Z Validator -- Enyo 4275.09 ~136% OC E8500/8GB/1284EE CPU-Z Validator

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