You are on a very tight budget...right?I don't think AMD has to be your choice. There will probably be a lot of opinions on your question. I would get and ECS P4M800PRO-M motherboard. They are an inexpensive but reliable motherboard. Like anything else, maintain all your components well. Keep them cool and not full of dust and fur balls and stuff. It has the Intel 775 CPU socket. This gives you a lot of choices. I would get an Intel 945 or 925 Presler, dual core CPU. The 945 runs @ 3400mhz x2. Each core has 2 MB of cache. It has the hookup for your sata 1.5. It does have an AGP slot. You can run, 400 mhz/533mhz. DDR or DDR2 ram. The front side bus of the Presler processor is 800. The FSB of the board is 1066 (all will work). At Fry's I got the motherboard and cpu bundle(the ones I listed) for about $125. I run 2 Gigs of 533mhz ddr2 with a couple of SATA 1.5's and My Vista program give me a 4.6 performance ratio. XP runs great on it also. I am stepping up to the new Intel QUAD soon but this setup has been very competitive. I run an EVGA 8800 GTS 320mb SC GFX and it games with no hesitations. Good Luck.
